How to convert between wealth and income tax
paulgraham.com> To convert between wealth and income tax rates, you have to divide by the rate of return on capital. The conversion rate of 20 comes from assuming that the risk-free rate of return is 5%.
This seems to only be true for people whose income entirely comes from their wealth, rather than their labor. The math doesn't math for someone on the other extreme end of the spectrum who has zero savings or investments and obtains all his income from labor: To him, a N% wealth tax = 0% income tax for all N. Those with -some- savings are somewhere in the middle.
It is a very sneaky way to argue that a wealth tax should be as across-the-board unpopular as a large income tax increase. But Graham's math is only applicable to those flush with investments and with relatively small salaries from labor, so a wealth tax is only unpopular to that particular group.
I can't tell what's worse: intentionally obscuring the fact that the vast majority of people would pay ~no wealth tax or unintentionally forgetting that the vast majority of people would pay ~no wealth tax.
On the other hand, almost a majority of people already pay no federal income tax anyways. Mitt Romney mentioned a number of 47% during his presidential campaign and that number was mostly true. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/sep/18/mitt-romne...
People love to talk about the marginal tax rates but not the average tax rates. And I think that’s right because the conversation should be focused on the wealthiest people.
> On the other hand, almost a majority of people already pay no federal income tax anyways.
That's an irrelevant diversion though, because the measure that matters when discussing the fairness of taxes is how much people are left with at the end after paying whatever taxes they pay, including sales tax, income tax, and any other kind of tax. And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none, and for the people for whom a wealth tax would even apply the answer is unimaginable amounts.
That's not all that matters. The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society. And thinking that billionaires will just take a wealth tax as served, and perhaps will ask "can I have some more" is one way to think about this, but probably not the best way. A better way to think is that action might be followed by reaction. There is no manifest destiny for California to be the epicenter of tech.
California already has very high taxes. I think marginal tax rates are higher in California than for UK tax residents, certainly for CGT, and roughly similar for income tax.
I'd say the fact that California remains the epicenter of tech despite its high taxes suggests concentration of talent matters far more than tax rates.
Yeah, the marginal rates for California are approximately the same as I pay in Ireland. The capital gains taxes are way lower though.
Does the government not have the goal to make society a more just society? When did that stop being a priority of government? Even a teeny, tiny one?
Sure, the government has that goal too. But the government has many tools, and using taxes for that is using the wrong tool. Or maybe you think that billionaires owe us not only to pay taxes, but also to play nice, and pay those taxes with a smile on their face?
Billionares shouldn't exist. We shouldn't just tax them for the revenue. We should tax them to limit the undemocratic power that comes with excessive wealth.
Agreed. Humans evolved in a tribal, local community leadership system. To have as much wealth as millions of people that you never interact with should not exist as a person. It is against the system principles of humanity; either create a new species and turn the billionaires into them, or balance the system.
> pay those taxes with a smile on their face
The government's monopoly on punitive violence isn't only intended for the peasantry...
Funding the government, which has the goal to create a more just society, means taxes should support that.
If you're not using your funding to support your goals, thats corruption.
This is wishful thinking. Billionaires can vote with their feet, or can pay expensive lawyers and accountants to find all the possible loopholes to not pay those taxes. California wants to tax Elon Musk for his trillion dollars. But how much of that trillion dollars was generated in California? He has a very valid claim that a lot of it was generated in Texas, and he'll go all the way to the Supreme Court with that.
People can vote that a new tax should be levied on billionaires, but can't vote how those billionaires will react to the tax. Moving out of state is one option (see Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc). Hiring armies of lawyers to challenge any wealth assessment is another. Litigating to the Supreme Court yet another. I'm not a billionaire and never will be, but if I can think of these few ideas, they can think of 100 times more.
It's wishful to ask the system designed for a goal, to do the goal?
Exactly. You can ask many things, like you can ask for world peace, and you can ask for universal brotherly love. If the ask has no chance to result in the outcome you desire, it's purely wishful thinking.
It feels to me you are asking "why can't we just eliminate billionaires". Well, they have a vote in that decision.
What are those other tools?
>and pay those taxes with a smile on their face?
Considering the alternative for them over the past millennia has been, inevitably that they get caught, hanged, quartered, beaten and other various violent methods: yes, they should smile, they're buying their lives with all that money :)
> they're buying their lives
Extortion is the word that summarizes your point.
Ah yes, extortion is not the part where their disproportionate centralisation of wealth threatens your very livelihood with every action they take. Extortion isn't when they happily tell you they're going to replace you with AI. Extortion isn't when they steal your money with unpaid hours, it isn't when they threaten to fire you if you don't shut the fuck up and do as they say, when they act as a state within the state, corrupting institutions and polluting the very ground you, your children and your food grow on, it's when they're being held accountable for their actions and told that if they're going to have a personal wealth equal to that of millions, they also have the sum of responsibilities of these millions.
Just so you know, careers as a bootlicker are kind of a dead end.
Careers of insulting people are also kind of a dead end.
Oh no, don't worry, that's a hobby. Never monetize your hobbies, it takes all the joy away from it.
You clearly don't understand psychology at all. Rule by fear has a major downside that Machivelli warned about. If you keep people under threat all the time, as soon as the threat fails and you can no longer point a gun at your head they preemptively kill you and feel good about it.
Threatening violence to get what you want always ends with you being out-violenced by a bigger thug.
This is how alpha chimps function in their tribe. They resort to war and violence to prolong their rule, and it works for long enough, thats all they need for the cost-benefits to be worth it on their side.
In humanity, being the alpha chimp, you can actually just run away from the tribe with all your wealth instead of outright die and form a new identity and start a life elsewhere and change your last name and go somewhere not well known, and if you and your family does this for enough generations you are forgotten.
I think this might explain the rotten apples at the tip-top of our industrial/societal wealth classes. I think they are these people, played out over generations, having somehow survived the system that used to make it impossible to do this when at the chimp level (or even medieval maybe, maybe this new form of evasion only arose in the industrial age).
Okay sure. What other concept or label would you recommend I use to describe a leader in a tribe?
It's only by fear if they don't understand how to restrain themselves. Behave well with all your wealth, and nothing will happen: it's the same reason why wealthy patrons of art and craftsmen were at least respected, and why things ended poorly for robber barons.
And no, I do not believe that Musk's flabby arms or Bezos' shiny head are a threat of bigger violence to me anyways.
> The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society.
Both are important reasons for taxes.
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." (often attributed to Louis Brandeis, though he probably never said exactly the quote)
Taxation is one of the primary tools for avoiding destructive levels of wealth concentration.
Of course, the wealthy decry this as unfair wealth redistribution but all governments engage in constant wealth redistribution.
In the US we happen to have decided (since the Reagan era) that through increasingly regressive taxes the redistribution will almost always function upwards, ultimately resulting in the oligarchical dismantling of our government that we find ourselves in today.
There is no consensus on what is "fair" to tax, you can find people arguing from 0% to 100%. And if we're talking about measures of fairness. A much better measure is something like trying to maximise the median living standard without sacrificing any one demographic.
> And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none...
So... where are the real resources coming from then? Because if these people aren't using them to support their living standards they must be doing something else. If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something.
Because I agree that the taxes aren't going to come out of the wealthy's living standards, but the implications of that in practice are not good.
> If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something.
Yes, and that "somewhere else" is others' excess profit.
That excess profit comes from (a) inventing or investing capital with a return or (b) paying less for goods / labor than they can be sold for.
Capitalist profit has always been equal parts ingenuity and fucking other people over, and as most often implemented makes no discrimination between the two.
The bargain by which this has traditionally been squared is "the person who made the profit gets to keep some of it" + "they pay the rest in taxes to support the society they're successful in and depend on."
Unfortunately over the years this has continually been eroded by capital's invasion into democracy, with the express purpose of neutering the latter part of that bargain.
Those who would be hit with a wealth tax are incensed by it precisely because it would be less avoidable than the myriad of loopholes that have been engineered into income taxes.
And in terms of real resources - who do you expect to have less and what do you expect them to have less of? Because "excess profit" is an economic concept, not a real thing.
By using progressive taxes, either wealth or income, those who benefited from the current system get to keep some of those excess benefits, while keeping less than they would under a no tax system.
No, I mean real resources as in tangible ones. Although in this case I'd also be interested in redirected labour even though that isn't really a tangible asset. Like if you were explaining to someone who didn't speak english and you had to point at the things that the wealthy control that you want to tax away from them, what real objects do you point at?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource#Tangible_versus_intan...
Why does tangible vs intangible matter?
For the last ~3000 years of human history, wealth has been liquid via some form of money.
Excess profit is a stupid fairy tale told by the bearded idiot. It is literally impossible to not retroactively 'exploit' somebody. Not just in the practical 'need to know what the end user will do with it to avoid them making an excess profit' but if the value changes over time they need to somehow predict that perfectly or else be guilty of exploitation. The notion itself always assumes that the capitalist should get absolutely nothing because he isn't doing "real work" and then ignores how things fall apart without them, or how much that the worker would have to do to substitute for them.
Ironically the communists have managed to out-greed the capitalists through this one fantastical concepts. Capitalists accept that they need to pay people to get their inputs and try to make the most of it one way or another. Communists are kept up at night at by the thought that somebody else may have made a penny off of their labor, and think that they need to murder them for it.
The "excess" in "excess profits" means profits greater than what a fully-competitive, perfect market would allow.
No one would be paying Apple or Google 30% of their revenue if there were infinite alternative app distribution options.
The essence of post-capitalism is that a lack of market intervention allows monopolies to not just grow (probably fine in limited niches with regulatory bounds) but also to rent seek without investing and adding value.
So yes, profit is a motivational force that has outperformed all others to date in aligning individual action with market desires.
But the excess profit era the US has been sliding towards for decades is not a free market.
When was the last time a large corporation was forcibly broken up?
> A much better measure is something like...
Yes. Focus on outcomes.
Pick a target amount of inequity. Act to hit that goal. Adjust as needed.
For example, I advocate restoring our gini coefficient from the current 0.48 (?) back to 1970s era 0.35. People smarter than me will figure out how to best measure inequity, ideal targets, and implementation details.
Arguing about all the misc tax rates, purposefully ignoring the macro, is an obfuscation strategy to prevent taking any action at all. Straight out of the CIA's field guide on sabotage.
There is very little debate that you should be taxed proportionally to your total wealth; I.e. that the rich should pay more than the poor. In fact the only people trying to debate this are the rich who want to avoid paying back towards the society that enabled their success.
> I.e. that the rich should pay more than the poor
How else could it work? The poor don't have enough money to tax them. That's why they're poor. Schemes where the rich don't get taxed are systems that tend towards the 0% tax for everyone end of the spectrum.
Pretty cool that the taxes high earners stop paying are not considered income taxes.
(Social security and Medicare)
Social Security tax is the only tax that has a limit. Medicare tax applies to all wages and high earners even pay an extra percentage.
SS tax has a limit because benefits are also limited. It is a forced retirement plan where if you live long enough, you might get back what you paid in.
i hate when people bring it up. everybody that works pays payroll taxes which is around 25% when you count both sides.
It’s 15.3% counting both sides, and capped. And it’s the only “tax” that is paid back, at progressive rates, because it’s a retirement annuity not an income tax.
It’s an income tax wearing the trenchcoat of a retirement annuity- it’s not one for any practical purpose.
Federal payroll taxes in the US are 15.3% (7.65% for each side).
Social security and Medicare are also payroll "taxes" in that they're not optional and are automatically deducted.
This is called insurance, not tax.
If the government mandates it under threat of violence, it’s called a tax.
It could also be classified as an insurance premium, but a government mandating it is the key characteristic of a tax.
But the fact that the government reduces the annuity amount by increasing retirement age and benefit purchasing power means it is not insurance either. It is wealth redistribution from the working to the non working.
Yeah, that's how insurance works: it is wealth distribution from those who have not become (yet) an insurance case to those who have not.
If you have a car, you need to pay car insurance. Is that also a tax?
The concept of insurance is independent of mandatory or not. That should be obvious, I wonder why it isn't to you. Maybe your ideology prohibits clear thinking and makes you vote Trump?
>Yeah, that's how insurance works: it is wealth distribution from those who have not become (yet) an insurance case to those who have not.
In the context of differentiating between wealth redistribution and insurance, insurance does not redistribute wealth, insurance redistributes risk since underwriting in a competitive marketplace ensures you only a premium commensurate to your risks.
For example, the government mandates only liability insurance up to $x, for which the premium for the same coverage can be vastly different depending on each person's driving history. While this can be considered a tax because the government mandates it, one can see how this is not wealth redistribution since the "tax" being paid is at least partly dependent on one's risk profile.
Contrast this with a government mandated defined benefit pension contribution equal to a percentage of one's earned income, with a known fact that one's contributions will reflect their benefit less and less as the years go on. That is far more "wealth redistribution" than "insurance".
Another example is in the US, health insurance premiums are more tax than an actuarially calculated premium based on health risk. This is because health insurers are not allowed to price health insurance based on health risks. It is explicitly a redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and sick, due to the maximum age rating factor and inability to underwrite based on pre-existing health conditions.
Something can be mandatory insurance AND a tax.
Homeowners already pay a wealth tax.
> Homeowners already pay a wealth tax.
If you're talking about property taxes, then renters pay that as well through their rent (which passes through the landlord before getting to the city/county).
* https://realestatemagazine.ca/do-residential-tenants-pay-pro...
And is some (many?) cases higher rates than owners:
* https://www.renx.ca/renters-often-pay-higher-municipal-taxes...
Renters will always pay one way or another. You can name it wealth tax or property tax or house tax. It doesn't matter -- the result will be higher rent.
Economy's doing good? Rent increases because people can afford to pay more, and demand is always very high.
Economy's doing badly? Rent increases because costs and taxes for the landlord are higher.
UBI? Rent increases because people have more disposable income.
---
The secret to the infinite money glitch is to maintain a much lower supply than the demand, and to concentrate jobs within a small area
The point of my post was to indicate that just because you're a home owner (rather than a renter) does not make you special.
Property taxes are not wealth taxes, but fees for services rendered by the local government. Both home owners and renters (may) benefit from those fees.
It's a wealth tax. You're just describing what the funds are used for. Other types of wealth tax can pay for those things too.
This isn’t true. Plenty of landlords don’t cover their monthly expenses for providing the housing.
In what sense are landlords "providing" housing? Is there an argument around like, stabilizing a demand floor for new construction or something, or is this one of those weird in-group terms that cover over what might otherwise be seen as a relationship of power or dominance?
Either way, if I rent out my house and pull in $5k/mo but spend $2k/mo on principal, $2k/mo on interest, and $1.5k/mo on miscellaneous costs, that $500 "loss" translates into me paying $500 for $2k in principal value, all while gaining the benefits of solid inflation-indexed real estate growth AND assistance up the amortization schedule. So even cash-flow negative rentals are usually pretty long-run lucrative.
Providing housing is exactly how the word is defined - giving something - in this case a place to live.
Go and ask all the landlords in Toronto how the finances are working out.
Tons of landlords were cash flow negative against fully loaded costs. Then the market flipped and house prices dropped 30%.
Now they’re shelling out $2000 of their own cash per month, gaining $500 in equity, while they pay down a $700,000 mortgage on a home worth $500,000.
This sounds like an investment that didn't pan out - I've had one or two of those myself, never pleasant. But are they providing housing? I guess in my mind the builders, equity incentive assistors, re-zoning advocates, etc might be 'providing housing'. How is a landlord providing housing?
> This isn’t true. Plenty of landlords don’t cover their monthly expenses for providing the housing.
Just because landlords don't clear their monthly expenses does not mean that the tenant's rent is not going to cover (a portion of) property taxes.
Sure but it’s not a direct one for one.
It like me buying a laptop and saying I pay for the electricity in the factory in China.
While it’s true the money helps pay for it, it’s not a pss through expense.
Then they should get out of that business, right?
I assume that rising property values make the endeavor worthwhile?
tone: I am not being snarky here. Genuine question.
And even if the house represents negative wealth - same property taxes apply to a house regardless of whether the owner owns it outright with no mortgage (wealthy) or if they're paying 8% interest on an underwater mortgage (negative wealth). And, unlike VCs, property taxes are paid - often for decades - before one even sees if they'll even realize any wealth from the estimated value of their home that they pay tax on.
> intentionally obscuring the fact that the vast majority of people would pay ~no wealth tax or unintentionally forgetting that the vast majority of people would pay ~no wealth tax.
I consider this fine, because proponents of a wealth tax consistently omit that it will ultimately be the middle class who pays the tax... the ultra-wealthy and wealthy can afford sophisticated strategies to render a wealth tax ineffective against them, and if that doesn't work they can just move somewhere else. Income tax was the same.
If you paid attention to proponents of a wealth tax in the US, you would be aware that they only ever suggest it for vast wealths of like $10 million+.
That’s like 2 pretty good houses in the bay area. Hardly “vast wealth”, and these sorts of things are rarely inflation adjusted over time.
The Bay Area is one of the most expensive parts of the United States and $10M still means you own half a dozen houses. I’d say that’s reasonably “wealthy” from the perspective of the majority of the population who struggle to afford even one.
Sure, I’d agree with “reasonably wealthy”, just not “vast” wealth.
Anyone who owns two $500k houses is wealthy in 2026. I used to own two worth less than that and didn’t consider myself wealthy, but I was by the statistics.
Them moving somewhere else is an easy fix. Just put an exit tax on the ultra wealthy.
Even that is subject to shenanigans... above a certain level of wealth the overhead of establishing companies, tax residencies, and complex debt arrangements become a rounding error.
Some of the mechanisms are loopholes, that might be closed l. But many start to interact with international business regulations that exist for considered reasons, and are harder to change even if it is serving as a loophole.
You end up with only the small wealth (one lifetime as a skilled professional) group getting caught
Sanction them and their companies. Sanction countries that accept these anti-society misanthropes. Bar them from the US and any territories, encourage our allies to bar them as well. Investigate those companies for crimes to the full extent of the law.
Nobody needs these billionaires; we can create new billionaires and new products. They think they bring some sort of ultra speciality but in reality they are doing something millions want to do and their monopolistic success is preventing others from succeeding; knocking these giants down makes rooms for new businesses and products. This is the entire thrust of a capitalistic economy.
I don't have any more to fear from politically-influential private-sector billionaires than I do from the government enforcing a sanctions regime.
As has happened in nearly every European state with wealth taxes. But the elephant in the room is that these policies give the same ineffective, corrupt and entirely worthless politicians even more money to "manage". The very definition of delusional wishful thinking.
this is the key fact. If a wealth tax were enacted and a responsible group were endowed with the money we might reap some value from a wealth tax. Giving American Politicians more tax money is like giving a heroine addict more heroine.
If the ultra wealthy move out a few people will lose their jobs (their family office, some accountants, some property managers will work the same job for someone else). But overall people will not be worse off.
We have been doing this exact experiment in Seattle sine 2024 when Bozos moved out. And last month Howard Schultz moved out as well. The sky did not fall.
Another example- did the average Londoner get better off when Russian oligarch parked their money in London in early 2000s? And likewise - was the average Londoner worse off when that money was frozen in Jan 2022 when Ukrainian war started? Not really…
Starbucks is moving its headquarters from Seattle to Tennessee.
Many other businesses that are not large enough to interest the newspaper are moving out as well.
Like I said: the sky is not falling.
I don’t think I understand your argument. If a wealth tax causes the wealthy to leave then you have even less tax revenue than before, right?
You also lose the jobs the wealthy were paying for, and the taxes those employees would have paid, and the sales tax the wealthy are no longer paying, and so on.
There was no tax revenue to begin with-nobody paid income taxes in WA before the millionaire tax. The jobs the rich will take with are few and very specialized: tax accountants, security people, some administrative assistants. When billionaires leave whoever mowed their lawn or cleaned their pool will do the same job - for the next owner.
What the politicians will do with these taxes does not matter to me. The only thing I dispute is this sense of doom because, of my god, Bill Gates and Andy Jassy and Howard Schultz and Ballmer will pick up their toys and leave.
> Starbucks is moving its headquarters from Seattle to Tennessee.
Starbucks announced they would open a large corporate office in Tennessee. It could be called a 2nd headquarters reasonably.
London is a highly housing-constrained city, so the most important way of answering this question is, what affect did freezing Russian oligarch money in Jan 2022 have on the London housing market? If it made housing cheaper or otherwise more available, it was good for the average Londoner; and if it did the opposite it was bad. I have no idea which effect dominated or if it even made an appreciable difference compared to everything else that affects the London housing market.
So I guess the influx , followed by the outflow, of the Russian billionaires did not have much bearing on ordinary Londoners . Which was my point.
The level of delusional wishful thinking here defies belief. Seattle and all other US "left" strongholds are decomposing and falling apart, with parts of these cities worse off than the third world. Instead of realizing that it's ineffective, incompetent and detached from reality politicians that have brought ruin and misery, you want to hand them even more money.
Brilliant.
Parts of these cities worse off than the third world? Have you been to a third world country? Or Seattle, for that matter?
The commonly scapegoated cities in the United States are not experiencing third world conditions. Appalachia is experiencing third world conditions. Hollowed out rust belt cities in the Midwest are experiencing third world conditions. These areas are not run by lefty politicians. The United States has a systemic problem, not a local one.
And yes, the systemic problem is that there are a tiny number of ultra wealthy people with wildly outsized influence on the government of the United States, doing everything they can to reduce the amount they need to pay in taxes while simultaneously ensuring they extract the maximum amount of profit from the US government's wildly excessive expenditures.
> Seattle and all other US "left" strongholds are decomposing and falling apart, with parts of these cities worse off than the third world
You can tell this is true because property values have plummeted and nobody wants to live there any more, right? Or, since that’s not true at all, possibly the people who craft the media you consume are not being fully honest.
I don’t really care about whatever taxes the politicians will heap on the rich. My point is that if the rich leave it will not the economic calamity so many pundits forecast. Life will go on without rich people.
Just look at Oregon for example. It’s a lot like WA state but without the billionaires. And it is a really nice place to live. If WA state ends up like Oregon I won’t mind.
The ultra rich are desperate to maintain their exclusive access to essentially pay no taxes through their "Buy, Borrow, Die" strategy (if you don't understand what that is you should stop and read this: https://gemini.google.com/share/e230bcecaaeb) and so they are using scare tactics / gaslighting around wealth taxes because a wealth tax would disrupt this essentially zero tax strategy.
"Buy, borrow, die" is a bit of a bogeyman of the Left; it's not a common strategy for HNW or UHNW individuals, and to the extent it is used, there are much better ways to close it than a wealth tax, which is coarse and rife with implementation issues.
The main implementation issue with a wealth tax is that it doesn’t at all interact with the capital gains tax. It’s easy to fix the implementation issue by integrating the wealth tax into the capital gains tax (call it unrealized capital gains tax for starters), make the tax refundable when an asset loses value, and netting it against the actual capital gains tax.
With this framing, the wealth tax isn’t a new tax; it is only prepaying the capital gains tax instead of allowing it to be deferred forever.
Unrealised capital gains tax requires some way to assess the value of assets. This is a lot harder than it sounds.
It already exists in the form of property taxes, which are quite unpopular.
>It already exists in the form of property taxes, which are quite unpopular.
For an unpopular tax, the property tax is remarkably ubiquitous. Are there really any popular taxes?
at least all financial assets (stocks, etc) are easy to assess value so why not start with that? same with gold, silver etc. Some minimal amount you can make it nontaxable to reduce administrative burden.
this a million times. Land easy, already being taxed. Any regulated financial instrument, also easy, take the minimum average yearly price of held assets. Tricky things like privately held companies, maybe we solve that one later, but even then there are valuations made at various points, anchor to those, be conservative in every case. If the gov primarily exists to enforce property rights... then people should pay in proportion to the rights that are being enforced on their behalf.
> Tricky things like privately held companies, maybe we solve that one later
So I spend 30 minutes to set up an LLC and then transfer my assets to that LLC. Now, I don't hold the assets; I hold a stake in a privately-held company.
Ultimately, the solution you come up with needs to be at least somewhat airtight; otherwise, it just penalizes people who spend less money on tax advisors. The generation of income is a fairly well-defined point where assets change hands and you can apply some quasi-clear rules. Ongoing taxes on the potential to make money are a lot harder. So I buy some gold bars or valuable paintings and stash them in the attic. Gold / Picasso appreciates. How do you tax me on that? Do I submit an inventory of everything I own to the government every year? How does the government check - do they get to rifle through my stuff every December?
And hey, here's a cool one: if my parent owns a company and puts it in their will that it's mine when they die, is that promise an asset I owe taxes on every year? It's clearly worth something: it's potential money down the line.
> So I spend 30 minutes to set up an LLC and then transfer my assets to that LLC. Now, I don't hold the assets; I hold a stake in a privately-held company.
Beneficial ownership is a well established concept in law, and this strategy simply would not work. If those assets are easily valued and liquid (stocks or whatever) then the taxes will just end up being passed through as the entity won’t be relevant for tax purposes. Sure you could try to hide assets or offshore them or whatever but you’d be running headlong into outright tax fraud at that point.
You would probably instead see less new public companies, more companies/divisions being sold to various groups under opaque structures and taken private, and a lot more weird borderline legal transactions done between private parties to pretend valuation of private companies or other assets are lower than reality.
> Gold / Picasso appreciates. How do you tax me on that? Do I submit an inventory of everything I own to the government every year? How does the government check - do they get to rifle through my stuff every December?
Yes, of course you would owe taxes on such things assuming they were over whatever exemption limits and such. The government can’t realistically check everyone. They just throw the more obvious offenders in prison when found and keep enough background “random audits” to keep folks scared enough into compliance.
And obviously the government has been making “hiding” such assets harder every year with the ratcheting up of KYC/AML laws. Over time you’d see these requirements for pretty much every major on/offramp for such assets like gold bullion dealers, coin shops, or auctions. A lot already are required to verify your identity and even report transactions. There is no more showing up to a car dealer and paying for a new car with a duffel bag full of cash, much less anonymously. Such a transaction is reported and you’d see this simply expand.
Property taxes exist at least in part because the asset is impossible to hide and more difficult than most to play games with valuation.
> And hey, here's a cool one: if my parent owns a company and puts it in their will that it's mine when they die, is that promise an asset I owe taxes on every year? It's clearly worth something: it's potential money down the line.
Presumably your parents would already be paying the wealth taxes owed on the asset in question. That someone might loan you money against a future inheritance seems immaterial but perhaps I’m missing something here?
If you properly taxed real estate in a progressive way, you wouldn't have to bother with taxing paper wealth at all---the collective value of paper is already reflected in the price of land. People with large paper fortunes inevitably buy real estate, and when they do, their paper wealth inflates the price. This is why median residential housing prices have dramatically outpaced median wage increases, along with anything else tied to real estate, like sports and concert tickets.
What level of property tax are you proposing?
Raising property taxes raises housing costs for everyone.
A progressive property tax would actually lower housing costs, by reducing real estate prices. There would be a homestead exemption, so there would be no impact on taxes for individual homeowners. I think it would tend to stabilize rents, as larger landholders would be forced to shed properties, which would be snapped up by smaller ones. The overall effect would be a decentralization of real estate, which in turn means a decentralization of wealth.
We already value private companies with a 409a valuation.
Most businesses in America are small and the owner has probably no idea what it is worth.
They are illiquid assets, not traded anywhere.
The value of stocks fluctuates every second. Sometimes wildly.
Weakest of the many weak arguments.
Let’s do the bog-standard obvious and sane thing and pick a single point in time, once a year and use the value then. Maybe, i don’t know, close of market on the last trading day of the year. At which point it won’t fluctuate again until the new tax year. Then, we can call it “mark to market” because we’re marking the value to the market at a point in time.
Finally, we stop with silly bad faith arguments because fluctuations in stock have been successful taxed for decades. This is how day-traders pay taxes, and it’s not even a little challenging to do.
A friend of mine, a few years ago, had his stock options vest. He didn't sell the stocks. The stocks tanked a few months later. The IRS said he owed income tax on the value of the stocks when they vested.
He owed more tax than his net worth, lost his house, everything, and wound up in a trailer.
He never saw the money he was taxed on.
> bad faith arguments
A person's net worth can have wild gyrations on a daily basis. It's not unusual for a stock to move 10% in a few hours. MSFT dropped something like a third of its value last year. What something is "worth" is an utterly arbitrary notion, and basing taxes on that is inevitably unfair an inequitable. (A lot of effort and handwaving is done by accountants trying to guess at what something is "worth".) Heck, what is your house "worth"? Do you agree with the tax assessor? I once told the assessor that if he believed my house was worth what he assessed it at, I'd sell it to him at a 10% discount and he can flip it for what he thought it was worth. He wouldn't take the deal.
With taxes on income, that is fairly well understood and can be accounted for to the dollar.
So your friend had a large taxable event occur, ignored any advice that such tax event would persist over the tax year, and failed to act at any time to address his tax shortfall. Sounds like he had a shit tax/financial advisor. And to consume all of his net worth etc, the number of options that vested must have been quite large.
Not going to be sympathetic to someone YOLO'ing their compensation/taxes.
He didn't know about that tax rule, which was enacted that year. A lot of people were shattered by it.
I think he must have relayed the tale to you incorrectly. Stock options aren't taxed until you exercise them. Been this way since 1969.
Restricted stock is taxed at vesting, unless you choose to be taxed when they're granted to you. Ditto since 1969.
RSUs are taxed at vesting/settlement as ordinary income. This was pretty much the case since 1969 as well, but fully confirmed in 2009.
Not an issue. If you trade section 1256 contracts, the current tax code already requires you to report unrealized gains by calculating the gains as if they are sold on the last day of the tax year. Brokers have no issues calculating that and reporting that single number to the IRS.
Reporting them is not the same thing as paying taxes on them.
The next day, the stock could tank.
BTW, do you think that a mortgage on a house should be taxed as "income"? How about credit card debt? Is that also "income"?
Calling everything a bogeyman without providing evidence or justification is a bit of a common deflection tactic of billionaire bootlickers.
There's a federal estate tax of 40%. WA state has an estate tax of 20%.
If most people you meet will pay a wealth tax how can you remember those who don't
You seem to forget that given the way taxes work, eventually, anyone, with any amount of money, will be considered "wealthy" because we'll keep running out of other people's money.
You're wealthy, or the definition will change to include you. The spice must flow.
>because we'll keep running out of other people's money.
that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, for two reasons. For one, as even Paul points out in the piece, a wealth tax below what's practically a risk free return on capital (~5%) doesn't eat into the capital stock, it simply means wealth grows slower, but still increases.
Secondly, there's no monotonous historical direction towards higher wealth taxes, in fact the opposite. We're living in an age of low wealth taxation, with only half a dozen countries or so, if I'm not mistaken, imposing one at all.
The risk free rate of return is usually only a point or two above inflation, and I’d argue that real wealth, rather than nominal wealth, is the true measure to look at to determine whether someone’s position has improved, stayed flat, or decreased.
> it simply means wealth grows slower, but still increases
But what does this mean? If you have a load of money in some companies, that's helping to fund their activities, and the companies' share price goes up a bit, you haven't gained any money. And you won't gain any until you sell some shares, which is already taxed.
They never sell their shares. They borrow against them, write off the interest, and then when they die, their heirs get a stepped up cost basis.
Rich people have been borrowing with their stock as collateral to access their wealth tax free for decades.
The debt doesn't just go away, and interest is paid on it. It's not "free". Etrade's best rate is 10.45%. If your stocks go bust, you're still on the hook for the margin debt.
That’s not how it works, though. Buy, borrow, die doesn’t rely on retail margin rates. It’s closer to 3-5%.
Assets are used as collateral for loans that don’t require any repayment until death. Generally the borrower can borrow up to 75% of their collateralized asset, and that loan is not taxed. When they die the assets are passed to heirs and stepped up to their current value as the new cost basis. They’re sold to repay the loan and interest. No taxes paid on the loan “income”, no taxes paid on the capital gains, 3-5% interest paid for the outstanding balance of the loan and I’m sure some of that gets taxed. Because the collateralized asset stays invested the entire time, it usually grows faster than the interest that will eventually be paid.
The 10.4% margin rate is Etrade's best interest rate, and it's only for large amounts. I looked it up.
> When they die the assets are passed to heirs and stepped up to their current value as the new cost basis...no taxes paid on the capital gains
And then your entire estate is taxed at 40%.
> and that loan is not taxed
Of course it is not taxed. A loan is not income, and is not an asset. It's a liability.
> Because the collateralized asset stays invested the entire time, it usually grows faster than the interest that will eventually be paid.
The higher the return, the higher the risk. It is normal practice to borrow money to invest it hoping for higher returns than the interest. It is not a scam.
That’s not correct.
Let’s say you put $20M as collateral for an SBLOC loan. The collateral amount and grows at ≥7%/year and you’re charged interest on your loan of 4%/year. You pull $1M/year that goes into the loan. This goes on for 40 years.
At death the cost basis is stepped up to the value at the time of death. All capital gains are erased.
Next, the loan is paid back before any distribution to heirs. This is done at 0% tax rate because it happens before any distribution to heirs.
Finally, the heirs get what remains and any inheritance tax applies to that.
So you got to live with no income tax related to capital gains. The capital gains are wiped out upon death.
Had you paid taxes along the way, you’d leave about $37M to your heirs (and none of that would be touched by inheritance tax).
If you did the SBLOC strategy, The portfolio grew to around $300M. The loan principal and interest are around $100M. Taxes are $64M. Your heirs get to keep $136M.
There’s less risk since there is never any sales over a longer period, so the returns approach the average.
There’s more tax paid by the SBLOC strategy, it just happens very acutely instead of over time. The heirs are also left with significantly more.
> All capital gains are erased.
Right. And then 40% estate taxes are applied.
All you're saying is that you can borrow money and invest it and hopefully you make more off of the investment than the interest on the money.
A loan is not income. After all, when you borrow a half million to buy a house, you aren't charged income tax on that. You also are not charged income tax on stuff you charged on your credit card.
Borrowing on margin is no different.
Running out of billionaire's money would be a good thing[1].
If they don't have money then they can't buy elections and aren't insulated from the consequences of their actions.
[1] Note: I don't really think we should literally take all their money. Just enough to reduce some of the power imbalance.
All their "money" is in business ownership percentages. It's not money.
It's ok if they pay their taxes in shares, in case they ran out of money.
That's even better. You just transfer beneficial ownership and route dividends to a different bank account. And now you have a LOT more Americans literally invested in Amazon/X/Meta's success. But poor Jeff, he did have to sell his yacht (no, the other one).
Don't speak to loudly of this fact, otherwise some leftist politician could come to the conclusion that human capital – the discounted cash flow of one's future labor income – should be taxed as wealth, too.
On top of that it seems to imply that a 20% effective tax rate is outrageous even though that's totally normal for most. Maybe it's not what you're used to as really wealthy person who avoids realized income and has a 0 or 5 or 10 percent effective rate. But it's totally normal for most middle and median income folks who actually pay income taxes.
It's 20% equivalent income tax rate if you have no conventionally taxable income. Otherwise it's 20% on top of your marginal rate. In his $100 example, you'd pay $1 in wealth tax on the $100 and $1 in tax on the $5 income earned, so your total tax is $2 on $5 of income, an effective tax rate of 40%.
But any real wealth tax is going to have exemptions, only apply to wealth above some threshold, and for the wealthy who structure their finances so as to have little or no taxable income, well they end up paying 20% like all the rest of us do.
> an effective tax rate of 40%.
It's not. That calculation would say that if you have $1000 of wealth and $5 of income your effective tax rate is 220%. It's bad math.
Your conventional income is taxed separately.
A wealth tax sort of stacks with capital gains, but capital gains is way too low anyway.
Yes it is.
($1,000 * 1%) + ($5 * 20%) = $11 tax due on $5 income. They are separate taxes but he's expressing them both in terms of an effective income tax rate.
In this case, since you owe more taxes than income you've earned, you'll need to sell off some of your wealth to pay up.
If you have no income at all, but do have wealth, then you get a division by zero error so I do get that it's maybe absurd to frame it this way, but the premise of TFA was "how to convert between a wealth tax and an income tax" and the context is a presumed 5% return on capital.
But when you liquidate assets you... pay tax! Capital gains tax. So you liquidate, pay capital gains, and use the proceeds to pay a wealth tax?
In the contrived example, the 5% return was "risk free" so assume it was something like CDs, no capital gains.
CDs generate interest, which is taxed as income, higher than capital gains. Just sayin ...
Right, but you don't trigger additional taxable income by redeeming them to pay your wealth tax, unlike e.g. selling stock shares.
It's not an effective tax rate, it's an absurd parody of an effective tax rate.
If that $5 of ""income"" is actually capital gains, then it won't be taxed very highly, and adding another 20% is fine. The discussion of 37% + 4.5% + 20% is misdirection.
If that $5 is honest to goodness income, then on average you're also getting $5 of unrealized capital gains, which means you're not paying $2 on $5, you're paying $2 on $10. Or maybe you realize part of the gains and you're paying somewhere between $2 and $3 on $10. A much smaller impact, and that's only if someone in a medium tax bracket with 20x their income in wealth is even affected by the wealth tax at all.
Yes, but more specifically, it's 20% on top of your marginal rate on your capital income which maxes out at 20% federal in the U.S. for long term gains However, it is much closer to 0% for the most wealthy Americans because they never realize their gains, which is the only time the U.S. taxes capital gains. They just fund their lifestyles with debt against their assets. Then when they die, their heirs get a basis step up at death.
Graham gets this totally wrong, adding the 20% to 37%+4.75%, which are rates applicable to labor income (and short term capital gains, but those are very rare among the most wealthy Americans). That is such a major error it is hard to take any of the argument seriously.
Edit: Updated account for short term gains.
20% tax on wealth (aka the potentially liquidatable value of an asset) would absolutely destroy anyone using an asset. For a classic example, look at property taxes which are a classic wealth tax. Grandma’s, people on pensions, and even middle class folks who own a home but have relatively low rates of salary increases get destroyed (and have to sell and move out) in places like Texas where property taxes aren’t capped/controlled like California under prop 13 when property prices go up.
Having your house get ‘too expensive to live in’, in fact, is a classic issue with property taxes, and was happening in California - which is exactly why prop 13 happened. And most of those locations the maximum tax is around 1-3%!
‘Wealth’ is not the same as income, because wealth is potential money, if you can sell - and if you sell, you lose access to it.
A 20% wealth tax would mean any asset which doesn’t earning free cash flow returns of at least 20% a year, or which isn’t appreciating at least 20% a year in a risk free way would be impossible to hold for anyone except the most rich people. And even they couldn’t do it for long.
I can’t think of anything which that realistically describes.
A 20% income tax reduces actual cash in hand to 80% of what you’d otherwise have, which isn’t great. But you still get the actual 80% cash in hand right now, and can use it.
You can’t have ‘80% control/ownership for the year’ of a house in a meaningful way, and especially for people actually using/relying on the asset to live, they can’t find 20% (or in most cases even 5%!) of the value in cash for the asset every year. They’d go bankrupt.
All of the people I mention wealth tax to give me the same two counter cases: Grandma and Elon.
I think there's no reason why a wealth tax can't be progressive. Just making up numbers here, it could be zero for your first 30 million, and rise to some palpable amount for your first billion.
This would protect granny from being taxed out of her house, and in fact would affect relatively few salary earners.
I'm not overlooking the possibility that such a tax structure could create an effective wealth cap at some level.
The problem in California is that it's very hard to change laws. Likewise in my state, where many aspects of the tax system are constrained by the state constitution.
Sure. The issue I’d see is in 20 years inflation might mean that applies to almost everyone, like AMT, but that is a future us issue.
The biggest personal complaint I have is why should the government be getting more tax money when all they seem to use it for is blowing up random countries in the Middle East and spying on law abiding citizens for whatever random reason.
You could peg the numbers to inflation.
Personally, I see a big benefit of a wealth tax being lowering wealth inequality; even if the money isn't actually used for anything useful. That would at least help prevent the ultra wealthy from being able to unilaterally ruin society.
I compare ultra wealthy to blackholes - overtime they accumulate more and more mass and reduce mass elsewhere. But even in nature we have Hawking radiation (which leads to black hole evaporation). So for me wealth taxation is similar like this slow black hole evaporation which seems fair.
They can't ruin society unilaterally, unless you're talking about Vladimir Putin, who can only do it because he's the head of an autocratic socialist state as well as potentially being the richest man in the world. But the rich bit isn't what does it.
Then let's bake it into a compromise, we add a wealth tax and decrease income tax with the same amount of money.
Labour is what actually creates value in society, let's tax it less and ownership more.
You have my vote!
Yeah, I appreciate the sentiment. Being a liberal, perhaps I was assuming that competent governance was possible. At the same time, the opposite tack, "starve the beast" was a failure.
Nobody starved the actual beast (military industrial complex) that I can tell
>I'm not overlooking the possibility that such a tax structure could create an effective wealth cap at some level.
No, I think what that does is create an effective corporate decimation. No one has a billion in cash that I've ever heard of. When you say "tax the billionaires of their wealth" because this billionaire has $1 billion, you're talking about his shares right? Maybe in one company, maybe across many. Is he supposed to pay that in cash?
How does this even really work? He could try to sell $200 million in stock, I suppose (if that's even legal according to the SEC, though that stuff could be loosened up), but what happens when he only gets $70mil for it because the stock price tanked? Should he sell more, until he comes up with that original 20% of his "billion"?
What if instead, he just gives 20% of the shares to the government, and they get to sell them, would that count? They wouldn't even have to sell them... the government could become the shareholder, until it controlled every corporation out there. The grift and graft would be massive, nothing to go wrong there. CEOs and other top positions basically appointed by whoever gets to be on the Congressional committee. The Democrats no doubt are certain they'll be in control of it, but then they'll be hysterical when it turns out they miscalculated. Could be fun to watch while eating popcorn, at least until there is no more popcorn left because the corporation that distributed popcorn melted down.
Wealth taxes are the domain of angsty teenage marxists and other retarded children.
How much does a wealth tax collect in the US, does anyone know? Does anyone care? Is it that they've identified a need for the government have revenue and devised a fair way of having the entire nation pay for that need, or are they just hoping it will be confiscatory in the most punitive way possible?
> No one has a billion in cash that I've ever heard of.
What's the biggest amount anyone has in treasury bonds or gold? You could easily liquidate a ton of that.
> but what happens when he only gets $70mil for it because the stock price tanked? Should he sell more, until he comes up with that original 20% of his "billion"?
If the stock tanks that much while he's selling, then the company is only worth about $300 million now, and the money he owes drops to $60 million.
Though I don't see why it would tank that much.
If owning stock (passively) all the sudden got taxed to any notable degree, you’ve just dramatically changed the value calculus for most of the world economy at this point. It would be shocking if the price didn’t crash.
That sounds like a one-time thing. Once things stabilize you wouldn't see a big fluctuation every time a CEO has to pay taxes.
Also normal people and the mildly rich and retirement funds and many other big sources of ownership wouldn't be taxed, so I don't see prices actually crashing.
>That sounds like a one-time thing.
Repeatedly pushing the "destroy the world economy" multiple times per day is most likely not going to be a "one-time thing". But who knows... maybe you're right and economics doesn't work like it has been documented to work by the world's experts for the last 100 years or so.
Because that's not what the button does...
Especially because every push shrinks the number of people affected by the button.
If your goal is to reduce the number of rich people this way, boy are you going to have a rough time.
If someone sells the stock, someone else buys it. The value is still the net present value of future earnings. This is a redistribution of wealth, not a decimation. The wealthy can still earn more if they want to.
When market cap goes down because overall valuation does, what do you think is happening?
Valuation hasn’t been tied or related to earnings for top stocks in at least a decade.
It isn’t ’wealth redistribution’.
Removing half or more of market demand isn’t going to be pretty.
Market cap and valuation are the same thing.
That’s what I said, yes.
Your argument must not be very convincing if need to refer to your opponents using slurs.
Using a wealth tax to nationalize corporations sounds like exactly what we should be doing.
>Using a wealth tax to nationalize corporations sounds like exactly what we should be doing.
You want Trump and company in charge of it all? Or are we finally back to "the next time Democrats win it will be forever!" wishful thinking? I mean, even if you want to nationalize everything, it's as if you dreamt up the worst possible way to go about doing that so that they've cratered first and started hemorrhaging all their talent in the leadup.
So let's not even think about how to build a better world because the administration we have right now is garbage?
We need a wealth tax, ONLY public financing of elections (no PAC money, no "I'm a billionaire so I can spend as much as I want on myself"), and many other reforms. Nationalizing critical industries and sectors is also something we should be pursuing.
From the standpoint of 1926, we built the better world and you're living in it. It's hard to imagine how much better off we all are, but it's not a law of nature, and with enough damage to markets and production, we can get back there again!
> no "I'm a billionaire so I can spend as much as I want on myself"
To me, that would seem extremely difficult for Congress to pass a law restricting individual speech in this particular way that would pass First Amendment muster, and I don’t think we should be at “let’s just set aside the Constitution when it clearly says something we don’t like” because I don’t think that ends well in today’s political climate (or any other, but it’s especially bad now).
We already have laws that limit how much you can give to someone else’s campaign. We’ve already crossed that threshold in terms of “free speech”.
An old law, belonging to a set of laws which have been eroded over the decades such that it's surprising this one hasn't been set aside already. Both Congress and the courts have changed in ways that won't ever let that be passed again, or let it stand if it somehow is snuck into law. That era is over, you will never succeed in bringing it back.
And if you think anything's going to change in November, you're going to be really disappointed.
Passing a law that restricts the amount of my own money that I can spend talking about myself seems especially directly a 1A violation.
These wealth taxes are not proposed to apply to everyone evenly, that would be a regressive tax policy. There is a wealth cutoff, most commonly proposed to be around $50M.
If grandma has $50M in her house and pension, she can afford to pay a tiny tiny tiny fraction of her wealth to make sure her grandkids still have a place to live that's not falling apart.
whats all this talk about 20% wealth tax. We are asking for 1% per year, and the rich are still screaming. damn I pay more than that on my house.
> 20% tax on wealth
Thank god no one is talking about this, then. According to Graham, a 20% wealth tax is equivalent to a 400% income tax.
Read my comment - it likely would be equivalently impossible. That is my point.
Read my comment - it is completely irrelevant to the discussion being had about the linked article, and no one on the planet is suggesting a 20% wealth tax. That is my point.
The argument was that it was ludicrous to say a wealth tax of x percent > income tax of x percent in actual impact, yes?
It is clearly the case if you try to apply the income tax rate as a wealth tax using concrete real world examples.
Even a 3% property tax makes it very difficult for many normal people to own those assets in many real world economic circumstances.
I don't think that those issues would be too difficult to fix.
The tax could be made progressive so that it doesn't impact people who can't afford it.
Someone's primary home and vehicle could be omitted from the tax.
It does change that there is a multiplier. Even 5% is likely a deathknell for all but a couple percent of assets owned by the most aggressive ‘sharks’.
A good way to make owning anything unaffordable though! The carve outs would just defacto set a cap for normal people. No more than one house, etc.
What's your definition of affordable here?
You can still own millions and billions of dollars of things, but you'll have to shrink your money pile over time to pay for those things if you don't have a source of income.
It depends on the asset and the ability to earn income from it.
The higher the rate, the harder it will be to do.
At some point, only speculators with deep pockets and the desperate with enough cash flow could do it.
You obviously didn't read the thing. 20% is not on wealth. The argument in the piece is that 1% on wealth is the same as 20% on income, and therefore 1% on wealth is obscene.
Please read before making replies that don't make sense in context. When I refer to 20% I'm referring the PG's characterization of a 1% wealth tax as an effective 20% income tax, not a 20% wealth tax.
I read it, and was replying in context.
Corrected version:
A wealth tax of 1% is equivalent to an income tax of 20% on capital gains.
With different issues than the ones caused by deferring gains forever through shenanigans.
It isn't, because the ultra rich have no capital gains. They get ultra low interest rate loans against assets so they never have to sell assets and trigger capital gains. Google "Buy, Borrow, Die" if you don't understand this strategy.
They have to sell eventually to pay off the loans. And if they die, their estate has to sell the assets to pay off the loans, and then their heir will pay inheritance taxes on top of that.
Unless their spouse is still alive. In the US, assets' cost bases are reset when a spouse dies. That is the main way that rich people avoid capital gains taxes. I'd much prefer simply stopping that cost basis reset instead of implementing a wealth tax.
> I'd much prefer simply stopping that cost basis reset instead of implementing a wealth tax.
Neither of these would really work against the people you actually want it to work against.
If you don't have a basis reset then they just do a transaction that has the same effect, e.g. create a new corporation owned by the recipient and then have it repeatedly enter into slightly favorable transactions with the one owned by the donor until the new one has all the assets, or any of a hundred other things.
If you try to do a wealth tax then their assets end up in another country under whatever arrangement is necessary to give them de facto control but not formal ownership.
The best way to solve the "buy, borrow, die" thing is actually a consumption tax because then borrowing money in order to spend it doesn't avoid the tax.
I'd like to see all taxes replaced by consumption, sales, and/or value-added taxes, with an automatic rebate to offset the regressiveness. It would kind of end up being UBI with a vastly simpler tax code.
This would be an extremely regressive tax regime, effectively a flat tax rate. Worse than a flat tax rate, actually, since consumption rates do not scale linearly with income or wealth.
I think he meant that you'd have the brackets apply to types of consumption instead of income level, so no tax on food, low tax on restaurants, medium tax on high-end electronics, insane tax on planes and yachts. I mean it sounds like it would be easier to maintain/enforce such tiering system than constantly fight with people trying to not technically be wealthy. Downside of course is that some people's luxuries are other's basic needs, but I wonder if there's been serious research on the implications of such system.
Easiest thing would be to not have any tiers of consumption. The stuff people "need" to spend money on such as food and housing would be handled by an automatic rebate, effectively a UBI. No other welfare, assistance, etc. What you earn you keep, unless you spend it, then you pay tax.
Boy, that's going to suck for people whose credit situation has shut them out of most traditional housing situations. Or people who rely on what other people don't consider food for sustenance, for whatever reason (protein powder? multivitamins? supplies to grow/produce your own foodstuffs?). Just as examples.
> Boy, that's going to suck for people whose credit situation has shut them out of most traditional housing situations.
There are lots of apartments available with no credit check. They're more often of lower quality, but if your situation is such that you want to spend less on rent and have more left for something else (like paying off your debts), why is it a problem for people to be able to choose that?
It's the status quo that screws them, because the government often pays out $1000/month or more in housing assistance but it's required to go directly to the landlord, and then if you have money problems but could live with family or are willing to take in a crappy low-rent studio apartment for a while, you can't take that money and use it to fix your situation instead because if you tried to do that the government takes it away.
> Or people who rely on what other people don't consider food for sustenance, for whatever reason (protein powder? multivitamins? supplies to grow/produce your own foodstuffs?).
Isn't this the opposite? If you give them a UBI then they can buy whatever they want. If you give them paternalistic micromanaged benefits like SNAP then they can buy carbonated high fructose corn syrup in a can but not vitamins or farming supplies.
You don't know what you're talking about. The corporate takeover of most rentals (apartments and homes alike) near the roadways and transit these people need to get to their jobs (let alone in areas where they wouldn't have to commute) has made those rentals inaccessible. They use little-known credit reporting companies specific to the rental industry that have basically no regulatory oversight, and which allow landlords to deny applications in an opaque way without liability. Housing voucher wait lists are years long; they're basically impossible to get on. The only housing assistance that was available to most people were pandemic-era emergency eviction grants, and those are gone.
Van life, couch surfing, living in hotels: these are the options available to them. And it's obviously not so simple as "roughing it" for a few months, as they're essentially forced to sell or abandon most of their personal property.
What you're talking about it taking people in those dire straits and forcing them to pay MORE money just to keep a roof over their heads, while millions of wealthier Americans own multiple properties where they and their family are the only residents. It's ridiculous.
>Isn't this the opposite? If you give them a UBI then they can buy whatever they want. If you give them paternalistic micromanaged benefits like SNAP then they can buy carbonated high fructose corn syrup in a can but not vitamins or farming supplies.
I am, once again, going to state that you don't seem to understand the topic at hand.
> The corporate takeover of most rentals (apartments and homes alike) near the roadways and transit these people need to get to their jobs (let alone in areas where they wouldn't have to commute) has made those rentals inaccessible.
No they haven't:
https://econofact.org/factbrief/do-private-equity-firms-own-...
> They use little-known credit reporting companies specific to the rental industry that have basically no regulatory oversight, and which allow landlords to deny applications in an opaque way without liability.
And then you rent from someone else because in reality large corporations own only a small percentage of rental units.
> Housing voucher wait lists are years long; they're basically impossible to get on.
You're again only making the argument for getting rid of those grants people can't get anyway in favor of a UBI that everyone gets automatically.
> What you're talking about it taking people in those dire straits and forcing them to pay MORE money just to keep a roof over their heads
How are they paying more money for anything to receive $1000 in cash instead of a $1000 payment that can only go to a landlord?
> I am, once again, going to state that you don't seem to understand the topic at hand.
>No they haven't:
I said corporate, not PE.
>And then you rent from someone else because in reality large corporations own only a small percentage of rental units.
Most of the rest are owned by medium-sized corporations that use the same services.
>You're again only making the argument for getting rid of those grants people can't get anyway in favor of a UBI that everyone gets automatically.
UBI within the tax regime described above doesn't abolish the paternalism you're attacking, it just shifts it.
>How are they paying more money for anything to receive $1000 in cash instead of a $1000 payment that can only go to a landlord?
I am, once again, going to state that you don't seem to understand the topic at hand.
Or maybe you do, and pivoted to UBI because you realized that the tax issue was indefensible.
What "high end electronics" would be taxed at a medium rate? Do billionaires not just use iPhones? Most high end private planes are the same models as regional jets (e.g. Embraer ERJ line), so a tax on them would still be mostly impacting normal folks' plane tickets.
The core problem remains the same: consumption does not scale with wealth. If we limit taxes go a handful of goods and services, then demand is just going to shift to something else. Consumption taxes give billionaires the option to drastically reduce their tax burden by consuming less. The lifestyle of someone with a $20 million net worth is not that much worse than someone with a $2 billion net worth.
> Most high end private planes are the same models as regional jets (e.g. Embraer ERJ line), so a tax on them would still be mostly impacting normal folks' plane tickets.
Planes are the things airlines buy, not the things economy passengers buy. If you're conceding that taxes corporations pay get passed on to consumers then what does that imply about corporate income tax?
Also, poor people don't generally buy a lot of air travel.
> Consumption taxes give billionaires the option to drastically reduce their tax burden by consuming less.
Isn't that what we want? An incentive for the money to go to creating jobs or charitable donations rather than private jets and third mansions?
Correct, corporate tax rates are generally regressive in their effect.
Building jets and houses creates jobs though. A more likely outcome of a consumption tax is that wealthy people simply spend less.
> Correct, corporate tax rates are generally regressive in their effect.
Corporations can be shell companies. Whatever rate or tax you want to be applied to "the rich" has to be at least that high on corporations or "the rich" would just put their money inside a corporation and pay the lower tax. So it turns out all taxes are "regressive" at which point you might as well use the the simple, uniform, less distortionary ones (e.g. VAT) and then achieve different effective rates via transfer payments, the most efficient of which is a UBI.
> Building jets and houses creates jobs though.
That's assuming they're building houses instead of buying up the existing stock while restrictive zoning prevents more from being built. Moreover, jobs building private jets or satisfying other hedonistic consumption are less helpful than jobs building battery factories or growing food, even if they did employ the same number of people.
> A more likely outcome of a consumption tax is that wealthy people simply spend less.
The reason wealthy people don't spend most of their income is that they already buy whatever they want and then still have money left over. Bill Gates isn't going to buy an economy car instead of a luxury car over a sales tax.
Consumption taxes are regressive in general and in particular with the 1%, they simply don't spend enough to have it impact their lifestyles.
This is what parrots continuously say while ignoring that the original problem was that in the existing system they not only don't pay taxes on the money they don't spend, they don't even pay taxes on the money they do spend, because they can borrow what they want to spend instead of using taxable income and then defer capital gains or keep assets in shell corporations.
Getting from that to where they at least pay the same taxes as anyone else on the money they actually spend would be a marked improvement.
Yes, getting them to pay "something" is a good goal, but if it hurts people who are financially vulnerable is non-optimal.
We already know how to solve that one though. You now have corporations and billionaires actually paying the consumption tax along with everyone else, so you take that money and use it for a UBI, which causes the effective rates on lower income people to be much lower or even negative even though everyone is still paying a uniform marginal rate.
That scheme still wouldn't work. When that new corporation is first formed, it's near worthless. After the series of favorable deals, the value of each share in that corporation goes up. Thus it still incurs capital gains taxes.
Of course people will try to cheat taxes, but they'll try to cheat any form of tax: income, capital gains, inheritance taxes, etc. People are good to try and evade taxes regardless of the tax mechanism.
Consumption taxes are regressive: a sales tax is a flat tax that taxes a billion on their $10 latte the same as a poor person. Consumption also doesn't scale linearly with wealth: most billionaires don't consume 1000x as much as a millionaire.
> After the series of favorable deals, the value of each share in that corporation goes up. Thus it still incurs capital gains taxes.
Only if you sell the shares, which they easily resolve by not doing.
> People are good to try and evade taxes regardless of the tax mechanism.
Which is why you should use the ones that are less susceptible to it rather than the ones that are more susceptible to it. Trying to identify the country in which "profit" is earned in an international supply chain, or value non-fungible assets not undergoing transactions, are easy to game. "You pay a given percentage when you buy something" is hard to game.
> Consumption taxes are regressive: a sales tax is a flat tax that taxes a billion on their $10 latte the same as a poor person.
The existing "progressive" income tax and benefits programs do worse than that: The billionaire pays less on $10 in marginal income than a poor person, because the taxes and benefits phase outs result in absurdly high marginal rates on the poor.
> Consumption also doesn't scale linearly with wealth: most billionaires don't consume 1000x as much as a millionaire.
Only if you're looking for it in the wrong place. A billionaire isn't going to buy a billion dollars in lattes, they're going to invest in some business ventures, which in turn are going to spend the money on equipment and vehicles and utilities and so on, i.e. consumption. You don't get a return on capital by sticking it in a mattress, you get a return by spending it to build or operate something.
> The billionaire pays less on $10 in marginal income than a poor person, because the taxes and benefits phase outs result in absurdly high marginal rates on the poor.
This is just patently false. The highest marginal income tax rate is 37%.
If you've read articles claiming that billionaires pay some absurdly low tax rate, those articles are counting their capital gains as income. Which is just a flat out lie, since those gains don't actually get taxed until the gains are realized, and the value of that capital can go down.
> This is just patently false. The highest marginal income tax rate is 37%.
Account for benefits phase outs as the tax on marginal income that they are and the marginal tax rate on lower income people is often well in excess of 37%. In some cases it has been in excess of 100% because many of the phase outs overlap and also combine with ordinary taxes.
Lol nah. The assets are held by a trust. The trust, being a friendly bunch, loan you capital which it gets by liquidating assets, at a rate of 0% with “don’t worry about it” default terms. You’ll probably pay a management fee for each loan.
You croak, your heirs become the beneficiaries of the trust. Rinse, repeat.
In this case, the beneficiaries of the trust pay income tax on the money they receive from the trust.
You don’t pay income tax on loans, and the trust exists in a place with no CGT.
It doesn't matter where the trust exists, what matters is that the people drawing from the trust pay income taxes on that money.
Debt is usually rolled over if the billionaire is still rich (banks will do that for fees). The only expenses are the interest charges- which were small 3 years ago but larger now because of how interest rate increased.
Re: estate taxes - almost no ultra rich pays them, even without surviving wife. According tom Garry Cohn (former big kahuna at Goldman Sachd and former treasury something or other in the first Trump admin) only morons pay estate taxes : https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/only-morons-pay-the-estate-t...
As per your linked article, they mainly either give away their money to charity, or they set up trusts. When beneficiaries receive money from the trust, it's taxed as income.
You could also just... not pay. And then lawyer-up when the IRS comes after you. (They will not come after you, because they know you've lawyered-up and aren't going to make it easy.)
IIRC this is part of how they avoid taxes in general. Penalties don't hurt enough for the ones who do eventually face them.
You missed this part in the article: “ Estate tax planning has become so effective that wealthy families can now easily pass large portions of their estates to their heirs without paying the tax”
The beneficiaries then set up their own tax avoidance schemes. With the effect only rich people with poor tax planning skills, to quote Gary Cohn again, end up pay the estate tax.
Without paying the estate tax, but when those heirs draw money from the trust it's not taxed as income.
I'm retired. I hope to get a 3% per year income from my savings every year after inflation and taxes. If my state implemented a 1% wealth tax on savings each year, I would go bankrupt in 20 years. I am hoping that I will live 20 years.
Lol, that's still totally feasible for normal FIRE/retirement situations, my understanding is that most proposals only start at $50 million or more. You can still have a super cushy retirement with $3mil+ and 3% withdrawal forever.
> only start at $50 million or more
curious how they came to that number. There's probably plenty of voters willing to cast a vote for $0.5M+ and plenty ready to cast a vote for $100M+. How was the line drawn?
The minimum net worth of the top 1% of households is roughly $13.7 million[1]. So at $50 million they can say "we're only taxing the top of the top 1%" as a way to sell it.
"The top 1%" is a popular target for these schemes because 99% of people might be convinced to support it, since it won't affect them (at least not directly).
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1212/average-net...
A wealth tax will affect the distribution of investments. It might make higher risk investments like stocks more attractive as compared to bonds, it might make them less attractive. More likely it might make publicly available instruments less attractive in general, as private investments have more flexibility in how they are evaluated. In any case, there will be winners and losers as the investment landscape shifts, which affects everyone. If equity becomes more attractive, it could force less wealthy people into equity, which means they will take on more risk. If private investments become more attractive, less wealthy people will lose out. It might not affect those with no assets, but that is not certain either. So, everyone will be affected, in some way. Impossible to model due to unintended side effects.
Yeah, "It won't affect the 99%," is the wrong framing. The entire point is for it to affect the 99% (by undoing the effect disproportionately high wealth among the wealthiest and disproportionately low wealth among the middle and least wealthy).
I think your assumptions are off, though; less wealthy people might not be "forced" into investment at all, but given the "opportunity" to pay off debt or increase/diversify consumption. In the end, the important part is the wealth transfer downward, wherever it ends up. No trickle, but you can pump it.
In 2020, there was a campaign (prop 15) to legalize increases on the property tax rate in California that only applied to commercial and industrial properties. Intuitively, the constituency for prop 15 should be very similar to a wealth tax on $0.5M+, since the set of people owning commercial/industrial real estate in California are mostly a subset of people with $0.5M+ wealth. What actually happened is there was heavy opposition and prop 15 was narrowly rejected by the voters. Organizations opposing the proposition included the American Legion, the NAACP, and California Beer and Beverage Distributors.
Arguably, there’s a disconnect where the people who lead civic organizations don’t have a great deal in common with the median member. They might be wealthier and generally more plugged in to power structures. They might not support policies that are in the best interest of members they represent, especially people who have a hard time representing themselves.
Anyway, if your goal is to get a policy enacted, it’s not enough for your policy to be theoretically good for the median voter. You need a winning political coalition.
There are probably good argument for it being lower (maybe circa $10 or $12 million. But I have a feeling they do want to try and not hit land-rich-but-otherwise-maybe-not "family farms" that have hundreds or thousands of acres.
Sort of like how the income tax in America started with it only applying to the top 1% of earners?
Do you remember when the top marginal tax rate was 90%? Things don't only move in one direction. The effective tax rate on the ultra wealthy has been steadily trending down for decades.
Today, sure. In 30 years I wouldn't expect to be able to retire with less that $50 million in savings.
I'm sure any wealth tax would only apply to wealth above a certain amount. For instance, inheritance tax only applies to $15mil and above. Likewise, when you sell a house the first $500K (I believe) in capital gains from the sale is tax free.
I don't think people with savings of $15mil and above (assuming that would be the cutoff) are in danger of going bankrupt in 20 yrs from a 1% wealth tax. Assuming your 3% return, they'd be earning $450,000 a year that wouldn't be touched by the wealth tax.
Sale of a house isn’t a wealth tax - that would be the property tax you pay, and the exclusions are pennies on the dollar on those.
No one is proposing a wealth tax on anyone other than the ultra-wealthy. If you are in a position where a 1% wealth tax would bankrupt you, then you probably aren't someone that it would apply to.
A sane taxation scheme should of course be paired with a humane social safety net that could pay you a comfortable pension.
But why wage earners should support you by paying more taxes? Reduce your spending by 33% to keep up.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or a serious point.
Obviously people who have retired and based their entire life plan on making that work have many fewer options than those who are still working. You are arguing that nobody can plan for any kind of secure retirement, including you.
It depends on the net wealth we're discussing. I'm sorry if I touched someone who lives with $1M saving. But should I be sorry for someone with $10M, which might be way more than 30 years of lifetime earnings of p80 population? Wealth tax is obviously targeting the latter.
Having progressive tax rate might be a better way to discuss, instead of blaming whole points.
> The math doesn't math for someone on the other extreme end of the spectrum who has zero savings or investments and obtains all his income from labor: To him, a N% wealth tax = 0% income tax for all N. Those with -some- savings are somewhere in the middle.
Productivity comes from labor AND assets though. You need the farmer and the tractor. Why would we create a tax system that encourages people to divorce themselves from having a stake in the means of production?
> Productivity comes from labor AND assets though. You need the farmer and the tractor. Why would we create a tax system that encourages people to divorce themselves from having a stake in the means of production?
This is exactly why economic models broadly show that taxing capital assets makes workers worse off in the long run. An abundance of capital means that workers will be more productive on the margin, so their wage will be higher. This extends to the capital-income taxation involved in income taxes: pure labor taxes or consumption taxes are inherently more efficient. There are countervailing effects (taxing capital income works as an effective way of indirectly taxing the unearned value of resource-like assets, or of idiosyncratic skills that happen to correlate with holding more capital-like assets) but they can only roughly justify the current income tax arrangement, not some extra tax on assets.
Oh good! I was worried that trickle down economics was self-serving nonsense pushed by think tank economists on behalf of their benefactors. Since it is economic fact rather than self-serving fiction, when I review its track record I will find that it caused an upward inflection in real wages, right? Right?
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Oops!
As long as capital doesn't get involved in some kind of highly financialized spiral getting further and further divorced from the real economy, we should be good.
That could never happen here. We have a history of strongly regulating capital and banks. Why look at all the executives we jailed for the 2008 financial crisis!
Total labor compensation has in fact grown. Unfortunately, much of the non-wage compensation involves services like healthcare that has become a lot more expensive over time due to burdensome overregulation and an overall lack of price transparency.
Also the wages of the fairly-large number of people who work in the health care industry itself.
>Since it is economic fact rather than self-serving fiction [...]
You deride the weak justification for trickle down economics, then proceed to link wtfhappenedin1971.com, a site that tries to argue for the reintroduction of the gold standard through a gish-gallop of random charts?
The gap between productivity and wages is striking, isn't it?
I'm not perfectly aligned with gold bug politics. Their faith in the Kindleberger world is misplaced and their tax aversion can make them useful to my opponents, but at the same time they tend to take the Cantillon Pump and Balance of Payments mechanisms seriously while my traditional allies do not.
No, I don't mind borrowing their charts. Why? Do you have a better go-to link for The Wedge?
>The gap between productivity and wages is striking, isn't it?
It's not. The (in)famous epi.org is flawed for all sorts of reasons, from excluding noproduction/supervisory workers (the highest compensated ones!), to excluding non-wage compensation (eg. benefits), to different deflators for compensation vs productivity. If you adjust for all of that, the chart is unremarkable.
https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/gr...
That incidentally, is the exact problem with the site. It presents a barrage of charts, without regard to relevance or rigor, and tries to persuade through sheer volume alone. Yet, if you scrutinize any of them, it quickly falls apart. That's probably why the site doesn't even bother justifying the charts, or even state the thesis, for that matter.
There are deep problems with _both_ arguments. Your "happy fun chart" does not include negative effects from the _types_ of jobs that are available now.
Nearly all good jobs are now concentrated in dense city cores, in the ever-dwindling set of large cities. This drives up the _cost_ of having these jobs. For example, the median ratio of rent to income is rising: https://www.moodyscre.com/insights/cre-trends/housing-afford...
And this "cost of work" is not only monetary but also psychological and physical (it takes longer to commute). You also don't get nearly the same amount of job security as your parents.
From the epi.org chart - it indeed misses that a lot of stuff is now cheaper. Clothes, electronics, toys and even appliances - they are so cheap that we now treat them as disposable!
This smells like the think-tank "CEO comp justifies worker underpayment" and "health care inflation is wages" arguments, I'll look into your source but I can't pretend to have high hopes.
As for "gish gallop," right back atcha: those billionaire-funded think tanks firehose a lot of nonsense into the economic discourse (and curricula!)
What percentage of increased productivity has gone back to the workers as increased financial health during the last say 20 years? Not increased wages. Their increase in end of day actual financial health versus end of day increase in actual financial health of the owning class? Not some Peter/Paul highlighting Peter 'wages have gone up' while ignoring any stealing from Paul 'actual financial health' has gone down metric.
300 years of thinking has established that copyright is the best way to sustain ongoing creation of knowledge and thought, yet the same crowd seem pretty fine gutting that 300 years of understanding because of their judgement that their desired use case for today outweighs the cost to society of lost future knowledge creation, so they seem plenty happy to ignore established thought when it benefits them.
People at the bottom end of the income scale are sharply deterred from holding any meaningful amounts of savings, because this can exclude them from 'means tested' benefits. This is effectively a disguised ~100% "wealth tax" that hits many among the most heavily disadvantaged and marginalized. We're essentially telling people that they have to be living literally hand-to-mouth before they're deemed to deserve any kind of broader social support.
The party that abhors wealth taxes for billionaires is the same one that lobbies them into place for the poor.
The current system without wealth taxes already largely divorces labor from equity stake. Unless you're one of the relatively few tech or office workers who get equity compensation or have a large savings rate, you currently don't have much of a stake in any means of production.
I'm not disputing the claim that few people are able to save and invest into having a stake in the means of production.
However, if your goal is to increase stakeholdership, how would a policy that explicitly disincentivizes that behavior fix anything?
Why do I get the feeling that you would never field the structurally identical complaint against disproportionately taxing labor and consumption, even though that's a much more prominent feature of our current tax policy?
In any case, taxes do not go into a black hole, no matter how much the right likes to encourage this self-serving fiction. Taxes generally get spent down the economic ladder and move people up the economic ladder, increasing their marginal propensity to save. People must have money if you want them to save money.
Even more concretely: reversing the policies which dissolved the middle class might reasonably be expected to restore the middle class, or at least slow their demise.
How does it disincentivize "stakeholdership"? Are people expected to say, please don't make me rich, because I'd have to pay 1% of it?
Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets.
But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers, which means that there's a lot less cause for concern about those workers not owning their means of production
>Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets.
Even assuming this is true, then what? Do you think the average joe is going to suddenly buy alphabet or meta stocks because bill ackman or ken griffin sold their shares to buy bigger yachts?
Perhaps you could direct this strawman upthread, to the person who implied that to enable the average joe to obtain a share in the means of wealth creation it would be necessary for the HNW individuals who currently own it to be able to maintain that ownership without paying tax on it...
All I pointed out was that at the margin, HNW individuals needing to liquidate 1% of their portfolio every year (and also HNW individuals not being disincentived from realising their capital gains as under the current system) actually works in favour of people trying to buy shares in means of production (by increasing liquidity and lowering prices), as well as obviously against wealth concentration.
There are arguments against wealth taxes that are actually credible, like those concerning capital flight, but this thread seems like a magnet for bad ones. Like, AMZN valuation dropping slightly at the margin from Bezos at al's forced divestment of portions of their stock actually being a bad thing for the economy as a whole is a defensible position; the utopian scenario involving delivery drivers ending up with a decent sized stake in Amazon somehow being impeded by wealth taxes isn't....
> Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets.
To whom are the selling? The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax due to their existing systemic advantages, like economies of scale or regulatory lobbying. This would accelerate consolidation.
> But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers
At this point I think there is ample evidence that policy in this country does not move forward without the consent of these so-called privileged stakeholders. If you take that as a given, why would you support handing these people an economic machine gun to point at your future self?
> To whom are the selling? The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax due to their existing systemic advantages, like economies of scale or regulatory lobbying. This would accelerate consolidation.
You don't need "systemic advantages" to earn more than 1% average annual return on your wealth. And strangely enough, not paying tax on their wealth accumulation whilst everyone else pays it on their earnings and trades doesn't reduce prospective buyers' advantages...
> At this point I think there is ample evidence that policy in this country does not move forward without the consent of these so-called privileged stakeholders. If you take that as a given, why would you support handing these people an economic machine gun to point at your future self?
Using pretty phrases like "economic machine guns" doesn't somehow make an argument of the form that wealth taxes somehow make wealthy people more powerful actually make sense.
>The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax
Or people who aren't wealthy enough to have to pay it.
Regular people have less and less savings to buy "stakes in the means of production". Capital is getting more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands: the top 10% of the country owns almost 80% of it all. Wealth needs to be taxed and redistributed.
I think it’s a good point that these taxes don’t apply to most people. Another reason they don’t apply is that most people save for retirement using retirement accounts.
But nothing in the article implies that these wealth taxes apply to most people. The argument is that a 1% wealth tax is equivalent to a 20% income tax because, under certain assumptions, the government gets the same amount of money.
Only in theory. In practice it’s not equivalent at all because once you reach a certain (very high) level of wealth, there’s the “buy, borrow, die” strategy that avoids realizing most of your capital gains. I’ve also heard of proposals to tax asset-backed loans above a certain threshold, which is aimed at the “borrow” part of the strategy. But the concern there is that the super wealthy may quickly find a different strategy for tax avoidance, so a blanket wealth tax should be harder to circumvent. But as with anything to do with the tax code, those with the best tax accountants and lawyers seldom end up losing.
> because once you reach a certain (very high) level of wealth, there’s the “buy, borrow, die” strategy that avoids realizing most of your capital gains
If that is what is being targeted, then why not actually target that. Apply some percent taxation on the current value of all assets transferred because of death. And, if they want, only apply it to estates over some X threshold in size.
Performing the taxation at time of probate makes the valuation easy (unlike a 'wealth tax') because the valuation could be one of "value at time of death" or "value at time of transfer". And, if the ultra wealthy are using this angle to avoid taxes, then this taxes some of that transferred value.
Of course, just like with subscriptions, to the politicians a yearly wealth tax is far more valuable than a one time tax on the total value of the estate.
>If that is what is being targeted, then why not actually target that. Apply some percent taxation on the current value of all assets transferred because of death.
That already exists. The rate is 40% of the asset value.
There is no evidence[0] that the wealthy use the "buy, borrow, die" strategy in any significant way. The underlying financial math doesn't make sense if the goal is to maximize wealth so it isn't surprising that wealthy people don't actually do it.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
"Focusing on the top 1 %, while total borrowing is substantial, new borrowing each year is fairly small (1–2 % of economic income) compared to their new unrealized gains"
"1 % of wealth-holders (above $14 million in 2022)"
1-2% of $14,000,000 is $140,000 to $280,000 a year. The median personal income is $45,140. They are benefiting untaxed to the tune of 3-6 times the median American income.
1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial. That their wealth is growing so fast that that is fairly small to them and makes the median American income seem small doesn't sell me.
How is an untaxed benefit of 3-44X the median income insignificant? I would love to benefit annually by that 'insignificant' amount. By this argument why should we not then exclude all economic income below $140,000 to $2,000,000 from taxation? Since it's 'insignificant'. Oh, right, because it's only insignificant in the context of 'they are so obscenely rich it's insignificant to them'.
That paper is looking at the top 1%. Buy, borrow, die is the realm of the top 0.1 % or 0.01%.
Are you saying that billionaires are actually realizing capital gains to afford yachts, private jets, and mansions?
Of course they are. You can read reports to the SEC on executive stock sales all day.
Here’s billionaire Tim Cook last month:
https://m.investing.com/news/insider-trading-news/apple-ceo-...
If you mean that a person with 0 savings pays 0 wealth tax, then sure. Most people when they earn income save some of it. Therefore it is wealth taxed.
It seems fairly simple to have a standard deduction so that only folks with wealth over a certain amount get taxed.
Almost all wealth tax proposal I’ve seen start at the level of 8-9 figures of wealth. Why are we now talking about it as if it’s going to apply to your average person’s savings account? If we’re just going to accept these billionaire-invented narratives around the wealth tax, then there’s really no point in discussing the actual pros and cons of these proposals.
Because it’s the standard playbook for dealing with even the slightest suggestion of fairer taxation. Trot out an old dude in a suit from a Foundation, make sure to avoid anyone knowing exactly what that foundation does or who funds it and have him suggest it’s a really nice idea, but the unforeseen consequences will actually hurt “working people like you and me”. Present as fact, job done.
>Most people when they earn income save some of it. Therefore it is wealth taxed.
This is one of those “check your privilege” moments and one where it is best to look at the median and not just the average when talking about household wealth in the US. Between 57% and 67% of U.S. adults are estimated to live paycheck to paycheck. They aren’t saving it, they’re going into debt because the only local grocery store is a Dollar General and it’s just a clever name nowadays.
Do they still live paycheck to paycheck after receiving a raise?
If so, the problem likely isn’t the paycheck.
At most times during the last 50 years, wages have been growing slower than inflation.
Ah, the old moral failing! It’s not that there are flaws in the system that could be improved, it’s the poor people who are sinful. Got it!
Australia is proposing a CGT tax of 30% on "capital gains" .. essentially taxing the _income_ from wealth.
This is more of a fair comparable to reason about when comparing taxing wealth and taxing wages.
In nerd-speak, taxing the Derivative of Wealth is comparable to taxing Income.
You could argue that a fair comparison of wages and wealth would first subtract the minimum cost of living, so that wage tax is effectively a tax on the growing wealth of wage-earners. This would arguably be a fairer tax comparison - in both cases it is the derivative of wealth that is being taxed.
If a large portion of the populace spends all their income on basic food, rent and petrol then they have no chance of wealth increase, and perhaps should fairly be charged 30% of their $0 growth in annual wealth.
Also, this seems to ignore a major problem with how progressive income tax rates are figured in the US.
You can work for years at a startup at a depressed wage, then have a windfall that makes up for it on average.
That windfall (in California) will be taxed at a marginal rate of 52%. The only people that ever pay nearly that much are middle class. Some sort of time averaging would help.
Anyway, the US tax code is complicated. Personally, I’d prefer a flat tax with universal basic income. This could replace income, capital gains and inheritance taxes in their entirety. (Along with a lot of social services bureaucracy).
I feel the same way. I hear a lot of complains about wealth tax but it always seems like the problems mainly pertain to billionaires. I don't see why we should optimize for that small minority.
If we moved to a wealth tax I'd be the first in line to pay it. So long as everyone else had to pay it too.
WSJ Opinion Piece: "Why It'd Be A Mistake To Inconvenience Billionaires" -Some Other Billionaire
Not even that. Someone who got laid off by one of Paul Graham's friends likely has decent investments and is receiving relatively small salaries from labor (that is, 0, unless you're counting unemployment insurance, and then, is that saved-up labor pay, delayed and amortized, or "investment" income from your taxes?). And if that person is class-conscious, or at least self-interested, they should be 100% on-board with a wealth tax.
Is this situation so uncommon? Almost everyone who lives in a house in California, for example, is living primarily off the unrealized gains on their home equity. Very few have the wage income to qualify for a mortgage on what their lifestyle is worth now.
California contains a lot of houses!
> living primarily off the unrealized gains on their home equity.
How is that paying for food? Insurance? Electricity? Gasoline? Health care? Gifts and charity? Or even taxes?
Illustratively, living in the house is worth about $15,000/month and everything else combined is maybe $2,000.
In other words, PG is so rich now that he forgets the existence of less fortunate citizens.
> But Graham's math is only applicable to those flush with investments and with relatively small salaries from labor, so a wealth tax is only unpopular to that particular group.
That can be quite a lot of people on HN, and also including FIRE people, so I can see why it's unpopular.
Most FIRE people aren't going to have $50 million plus and be hit by this.
I said on HN including those who are FIRE, where the net worth of the average individual here is much higher than the average and some do, yes, have $50 million or more in assets.
It will never stop at $50M. Once the law is created it is sooo much easier to just lower the threshold. Even if not lowered, in 30 years inflation means it will capture a whole different number of people - maybe you. Maybe it will bankrupt your children.
"taxes only ever go up" is an incredible belief to hold in a historical run of decades of tax cuts.
30 years is plenty of time to change the law. We change the tax code all the time. In 2020 or so it was recently amended to substantially increase the standard deduction. Slippery slope is a fallacy unless you can prove the pattern already exists.
As I commented elsewhere, everyone gets affected by a wealth tax, as it will affect how assets are priced and how businesses operate across the board.
For those who have little hope of the wealth tax applied to them (me for example), but as as someone who has investments and need them for retirement, I need to decide if this will affect bond prices or equity prices in a positive or negative way as their attractiveness will change in relative terms, or if publicly accessible funds will get devalued in favor of private investment opportunities and all public assets get devalued. Oh, wait, I am not wealthy, so I do not have the option of private equity, and cannot participate in what would be an attractive investment opportunity when investments shift towards more opaque assets.
For those that have zero assets, I do not think that a shift by the wealthy to private equity is a good thing, unless you want to work for a private equity company. A government job would be your best bet. And a shift to private equity would have a downward pressure on tax collections, so whatever projections for how much a wealth tax would generate, I am suspect.
A lot of people complain about private equity. This scourge was, to a small or large degree depending on your viewpoint, an unintended side effect of SOX compliance, meant to protect investors, and in the end narrowed down the amount of public companies, and created more opportunities/demand for PE. I think it is debatable how much protection investors actually received.
We live in a system, and making a fundamental change to one part of that system has effects on all parts. Raising the amount of taxes under the current system ? That is one thing. Introducing a whole new tax concept, difficult to predict. Especially if this is done by states, which could cause capital movements with their own unexpected consequences.
Did you expect honesty? Forthrightness? If so, why?
Also when most of you income comes from your wealth, your income tax rate is effectively 0%…
So complaining about having to contribute to the society that gave the conditions for your vast wealth is going to get you 0 sympathy
Billionaires gonna billionaire, I guess.
> But Graham's math is only applicable to those flush with investments and with relatively small salaries from labor, so a wealth tax is only unpopular to that particular group.
Not quite, because you're using the opposite extreme where someone has no assets. Meanwhile the median net worth in the US ~$200k, which would be $2000/year in tax for every 1% in wealth tax. That's certainly enough for ordinary people to notice.
On top of that, the conversion is even worse than that implies for ordinary people, because the primary reason the median is ~$200k isn't that the median person has $200k their whole lives, it's that they have ~$0 when they're 18 and ~$400k when they retire and the median person is about halfway to retirement age. If you transfer tax burden from income tax to wealth tax then that means they'll be paying more in wealth tax in the second half of their life, which means they need to be saving rather than spending the money not paid in income tax, including during the first half of their life. But that causes their net worth to go up on paper by more/sooner, because they're essentially holding extra money they'll only have to pay in tax later, which in turn causes them to pay more in tax for a tax on holding assets.
Moreover, then you can't say that Alice always benefits because she has no assets and Bob always pays more because he has $400,000 because what's actually happening is that Alice pays less when she's 20 and more when she's 60. That's going to be unpopular because the 20 year olds are generally expecting to be 60 someday but the 60 year olds never expect to be 20 again.
I've never seen a wealth tax proposal where "wealth" was defined as ~400K in assets. They tend to start in the millions with generous carve outs for IRAs and primary residences.
See reply to the sister comment posted earlier than yours and saying the same thing.
What is the point of this reply?
Nobody is talking about a wealth tax on someone with a net worth of ~$200k or ~$400k.
> Nobody is talking about a wealth tax on someone with a net worth of ~$200k or ~$400k.
If that were the case the criticism of Paul Graham's reasoning would be wrong to begin with because the only people paying it would be the people who do get most of their income from investments.
Moreover, your proposal doesn't actually work. If corporations don't pay a wealth tax then rich people just put their assets into corporations that they control but don't formally own (there are many ways to do this). But if they do then ordinary people with ordinary retirement savings can't be spared, since it doesn't change your finances to have the companies your retirement savings are invested in give you lower returns by the amount they pay in wealth tax than to have you pay a wealth tax out of the returns.
When income tax was first implemented, less then 1% of people had to pay it. Taxes are a slippery slope, and that number will slide down.
They don't even have to change the number. Per capita GDP growth and inflation cause the same number to impact more ordinary people over time by doing nothing.
We don't know, actually. If the threshold for "wealth" is set to be >100k, then we are.
And almost nobody will support that. It would be political suicide for any lawmaker to implement that.
I think the assumption that we're looking for an equivalence here is fundamentally flawed and with it the entire post.
For most people income is tied to selling their time. It doesn't scale at all. Unless the income comes from wealth.
The societal problem here is a group with self-reinforcing run-away levels of wealth. And to counter that you do need something more extreme than this nonsensical equivalency of income tax
The big flaw in his argument is that a mere 1% which is actually 20% of annual return is still less than the average income tax rate on workers, levied on people who have a lot more money and in some cases don't do anything resembling work. It's trivially true that 1% wealth taxes represent something in the region of a fifth of the average annual return on wealth, it's rather less convincing when it's suggested that this is harsh compared with income tax when people who pay more than half their much lower income in overall taxes whilst working 60 hour weeks and actually worrying about paying bills.
There are arguments about wealth taxes inducing capital flight and investment disincentives, the difficulty of paying tax bills from illiquid intangible wealth or even quantifying it, and whether it's really a good thing to pressure people building a company to sell much of it off, but telling income tax payers that an effective tax rate of 20% is high isn't one of them...
> There are arguments about wealth taxes inducing capital flight and investment disincentives
If the US and the EU introduced a wealth tax then it would be relatively difficult for the capital flight fears to materialise. But yeah, the trouble with wealth taxes is that wealth (i.e. capital) is mobile.
Which is why land and property taxes are probably the most effective way of taxing wealth.
Switzerland has cantonal wealth taxes, as does Norway and afair Spain. Italy, Belgium, Netherlands have a somewhat equivalent one on money held in securities or savings accounts. It's not that big of a deal if the rate is low enough.
Most of us would not prefer to follow the EU into irrelevancy. If they were the model for how we should be running things how come they are not the ones running the show on innovation?
> Most of us would not prefer to follow the EU into irrelevancy. If they were the model for how we should be running things how come they are not the ones running the show on innovation?
I think innovation is a tricky thing to measure, firstly. Certainly the US benefits massively from the world's largest capital markets, sucking in foreign money from all over the world. Is that innovation? is it stock price, or is it the work of all the academics, engineers, tech people etc?
Like, Europe (and the EU at the time) is where Deepmind came from, without which we'd be vanishingly unlikely to have seen Transformers/LLMs etc. Nokia basically made mobile phones a global category. ASML provides something that neither the US nor China can match.
And just to note, property taxes make up a much larger proportion of state revenue in the US than in the EU, if that's how you're measuring things.
And i didn't say anything about how great the EU was, I just noted that the US & the EU make up most of the richest countries in the world, where rich people like to live, so a wealth tax would probably work relatively effectively at that level.
Obviously that's not going to happen, but land and property taxes could get us a lot of the way there, with much less issues with capital flight and tax collection.
> The big flaw in his argument is that a mere 1% which is actually 20% of annual return is still less than the average income tax rate on workers
This is untrue btw
50% of people in the US pay effectively no net taxes
No net income taxes.
They still pay payroll taxes, state taxes, sales taxes, and various other state or local taxes and fees.
Right, the overall tax burden is closer to flat.
https://itep.org/fairness-matters-chart-book-on-who-pays-sta...
Or put another way, are subsidized by others.
Or put another way, they already make so little money it isn't worth taking any from them.
> 50% of people in the US pay effectively no net taxes
Billionaires included, defence contracts and corporate subsidies count just as much as food stamps.
I'm not sure how there is a societal problem with "run-away levels of wealth".
We have societal problems around food costs, housing costs, healthcare costs, &c; but people with extreme wealth are not bidding up sandwiches, studio apartments, &c, &c. If we "solve" their wealth by taking it from them and giving it to the government, what does that help? What good is the government going to do with that? Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living.
> but people with extreme wealth are not bidding up sandwiches, studio apartments
They are, though. Private equity continues to buy apartments and increase rates. States with increasing PE ownership also have increasing rates of cost-burdened renters spending more than 30% of income on rent and utilities, e.g. in Tampa, Phoenix, DFW, and Atlanta. Maybe not specific people, but the ultrawealthy nonetheless drive these changes.
When a PE fund buys an apartment building, isn't that really competing with landlords, not renters? The PE fund is not living in the apartment -- they have to try to rent it out, after all.
> they have to try to rent it out, after all.
Not really.
It's also a plan to hold onto real estate as market prices rise, flip for profit later, and not deal with all the issues that renters bring (management and maintenance costs, bringing up and keeping to code, potential damages and law suits, etc).
Keeping a floor or two active for Air BnB type short churn rentals while shuttering the bulk of a building can make $$$-sense to a PE.
Because a PE can have longer time horizons than a landlord or a real estate company?
"Landlords" (aka individual non corporate property owners of more than one residential dwelling) and real estate companies (those with portfolio's of land assets rather than those that just take a commission on sale) can do pretty much the same thing if the numbers pan that way and/or they have no stomach for dealing with Tennants for marginal extra profit.
Ownership of rentable property that is empty is a thing across the board, at least here in Australia where (stupidly(?)) investment rules and returns have made multiple property ownership a sound investment that grows regardless of occupancy.
Don't even need a long ( > 10 year ) time horizon, flipping on a two or five year scale still makes money regardless of renters being present or not.
It seems like you're saying, that PE, landlords, &c, are in a market where a landowner can hold on to property, not rent it out or put it to other productive use, and still make money. That is a problem, but not a problem with wealth or wealthy people per se.
Housing is only a good investment when supply is constrained. These PE firms buy housing because they see that NIMBYs are in control. As they predict rents soon begin to rise. Youve got the cause backwards
What's to stop PE from supporting NIMBYism in markets they're part of?
Nothing -- but the crazy thing is that people vote for it, not that landlords support it.
> Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living.
What are you even basing this assumption on? Just quickly comparing the highest ranking countries by Human Development Index with the highest government budgets per capita and the highest income tax rates would, if anything, support the opposite conclusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/personal-income-ta...
This is potentially a long conversation; but why would you start with rankings like this, which only go back a relatively short time?
Broadly speaking, human welfare got a lot better in the last three hundred years, due to productivity improvements that were tied to things like property rights, joint stock companies, availability of credit, &c.
We haven't really found a good alternative to it. It may seem to you that countries like Austria, &c, are doing the right thing by taking very large amounts of GDP out of the hands of private enterprise and using it "for good" instead of "for growth"; but that is just eating the seed corn. It looks good in the short term.
The HDI ranking has been published for 36 years now. And for many of those countries I would feel confident claiming the trend goes back to at least WW2, altough you would of course have to use other, contemporary metrics to support that to get a rigorous analysis.
If the initial step in your theory about human wellfare is to selectively ignore the last 35 or 75 years of history in the highest wellfare countries on earth, I think you should at least consider the possibility that your theory might be somewhat out of date.
Most of Europe post-war was very poor. I'm not sure the trend could go back as far as that.
How are you weighing the trend you highlight relative to overall long run success of private ordering, stock companies, readily available credit, strong private property protections, &c, &c, in raising people's standard of living?
Money is votes into the economy and what it shall produce. The more money you have, the larger vote you have. Taxes are the way the government takes controll over a fraction of the votes. Then the government can use this power to make good or bad decisions. One thing which is clear is that the billionaires is not using their power over the economy to fix any of the deep fundamental problems we are facing
Consumption is a kind of voting in the economy, I suppose; but the economy is heavily geared towards making things that regular people want. How many Corollas are there for every Bugatti?
If what you're saying is true, would it be unfair of me to say that the government is not using their power over the economy to fix any of the deep fundamental problems we are facing?
Is it good policy to take people's money because they aren't doing what we think they should be doing with it?
> you do need something more extreme
That's how you end up with an over-regulated country where people doing great things for the country's economy start choosing a different country to build their dreams in.
It's also how you drive the currently-wealthy to other countries to spend and invest their fortunes in.
The possibility of being ultra-wealthy is a huge reason to build awesome shit in the US that creates millions of jobs and brings the US economy ahead.
How is rent-seeking and monopolizing "doing great things for the country's economy"?
This nefarious logic has been used for 50 years to justify ever worse austerity and tax breaks for the wealthy. And look at the situation today: pedophile oligarchs rule the world while we fight for scraps. The West has no future, unless we start aggressively redistributing wealth.
Hasn't a rich oligarchy been the status quo for most of humanity? It seems to me most of humanity has had quite a future to look forward to, historically speaking.
I'd be reluctant to call the lords from the feudal system "oligarchs". Really, the people currently called such could only exist in a globalized economy.
But anyway, oligarchs weren't this powerful in the mid-century. FDR's New Deal was successful in bringing down the Robber Barons and ushering in America's golden age. Coincidentally, things started to go to shit with the introduction of Reaganomics and the promise that letting a few private individuals concentrate more and more wealth would be beneficial to the economy.
Yeah because the one thing the US has is a risk of being overregulated.
> In fact the conversion rate between them is about 20. A wealth tax of 1% is equivalent to an income tax of 20%.
Sure, but you actually have to work for continued income. Wealth accumulates with no input once established.
Wealth has the ability to increase (capital gains) without having to pay tax until it changes hands, whereas when income increases it is immediately taxed at a higher rate. Additionally, wealthy people can use securities as collateral for near zero interest lifetime loans which also bypass having to pay income tax.
> Wealth accumulates with no input once established.
This is incorrect, historically you'll pay a ~2%-3% loss via inflation if you keep your money in cash. If you invest (making it capital) in bonds or securities then you will see accumulation, but thats actually a risk premium.
> Additionally, wealthy people can use securities as collateral for near zero interest lifetime loans which also bypass having to pay income tax.
This is true, its typically called "Buy, Borrow, Die" but the reality is that it is only available to a very small percent of wealthy individuals and exists because of the way inheritance is handled ("stepped-up basis"). Even reasonably (not fabulously) wealthy people will still pay retail rates on the loans making the tactic basically ineffective. Last I heard you needed something like 100M+ liquid for lenders to even consider it (presumably, because they will make more off of some other deal with you)
The S&P500 has increased 9.8% annually the last 100 years, roughly 6% annually adjusted for inflation. Yes, past performance is no guarantee for future, but historically a completely passive index placement of wealth into S&P500 would double the real (adjusted for inflation) wealth every 12 years. With absolutely no work.
Also, if you are wealthy enough you can just wait out any economic downturn. Hell, Im not even that wealthy and it would have to get really bad before I would be forced to sell in a down market.
Yeah but the 5% Paul used is also kind of conservative since the 1970s stock market returns is like 10% ignoringinflation. Its a big difference if your well grows 7% verse 5% a 1% wealth tax with that in mind is only 15% but i think factoring in inflation is unfair concerning labor pays tax after inflation. That brings the rate down to 10% and thats without taking any significant risk.
I think a real solution is a forced step up in bases every year so people cannot put taxes off forever. It can be modest too 5% of your investment value delta. You could make the carried lost yoy track the net so you cannot be forced to pay when things are down.
Also the idea that capital gains tax should be less than income tax rate is strange. Like the people that own large amount of capital are in the lowest risk situations why should they also.have the most generous tax positions it makes no sense. No real person things the business owner who gets large returns is actually worse off or in high risk because if they were they'd be culled by economic evolution
Step-up basis is important for anyone who inherits property from their parents. That can be substantial in places like California where real estate has gone up a lot.
And for inherited rental property, there is another huge loophole: you can can depreciate the full market value of an asset that you got for free. That’s a substantial tax benefit for many years.
The step up basis makes sense in a world where you still have to pay substantial inheritance taxes. But with minimal to no inheritance taxes, the step up is a giveaway.
It’s also a practical policy. It’s far easier to know the stepped-up basis on the date of X’s death than it is to know the basis that X had in something once X is dead.
Which argues in favor of the inheritance tax mentioned.
There could be other solutions too -- say, require a virtual wash trade at time of inheritance, so the capital gains from the parent's lifetime are taxed at time of death and the child gets the stepped up basis. Somewhat different than an inheritance tax, but at least not a giveaway.
The full value of the shares (original basis plus step-up [or step-down] in basis) is already part of the estate and so is already subject to the inheritance tax rules.
It's just that the exclusion amounts are fairly high, so in practice the tax owed is often $0.
Right, the point of the person you replied to was about the scenario where inheritance taxes are small or non-existent - they literally said step up in basis makes sense when inheritance is taxed meaningfully.
I know. I read that. I was adding the practical point about basis establishment and record-keeping; I never disputed their other points.
There is little evidence that wealthy people actually borrow for income in any significant way. For example, this paper[0] finds that borrowing only accounts for 1-2% of economic income among the top 1%.
This makes sense. Borrowing for income in most scenarios is strictly worse financially than recognizing conventional income if you actually do the math. Wealthy people are optimizing for financial outcomes, not avoiding taxes per se.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
>...Additionally, wealthy people can use securities as collateral for near zero interest lifetime loans which also bypass having to pay income tax.
This is just Internet mythology. The IRS would go after such arrangements very quickly - the IRS has the Applicable Federal Rate for loans. Though this really isn't an issue with banks as they are not charities and tend to want to make money.
It is called “Buy, Borrow, Die” and it is a very real thing.
The buy, borrow, die idea came from McCaffery in the 90s which was before various IRS sections like 1259 and 7701(o) were codified.
Go get a calculator - if you took out a loan and had the interest set a the minimum of the AFR, what would it compound to in 30 years? It would obviously be much higher than just selling stock and paying capital gains on it.
The ultra rich do take out loans, and these loans do get repaid, and that money has to come from somewhere. Go google something like billionaire stock sales to see examples - if they all could just say, "Thanks for the zero percent interest loan! I'll pay you back in 30 years in my estate!" - I think they would have.
You're going to have a hard time convincing me the wealthy aren't gaming the tax system after all the reporting and leaks over the last ~40 years.
I suspect you are simplifying what's happening quite a bit, not sure if it's intentional or otherwise. But wouldn't the more likely scenario be that you borrow 100m with a 10 year draw at x% interest and then at the end of the 10 years you do a stock sale (some taxes paid), pay the interest (interest is generally non-taxable) and then take out a new loan for 500m based on your much larger portfolio, and finally claim significant losses against some other asset (regain your actual stock sale taxes losses "oh no my art lost value!")? Repeat ad nauseam until you're dead.
>You're going to have a hard time convincing me the wealthy aren't gaming the tax system after all the reporting and leaks over the last ~40 years.
Obviously every person tries to avoid taxes - you don’t have to be rich do do that - but the idea that there are magic banks that loan money and don’t mind waiting decades to get their money back is some kind of weird propaganda.
>...I suspect you are simplifying what's happening quite a bit
People keep saying “buy, borrow, die” as if it is really that simple - like it is that one simple trick that banks and the IRS hate.
>...But wouldn't the more likely scenario be that you borrow 100m with a 10 year draw at x% interest and then at the end of the 10 years you do a stock sale (some taxes paid), pay the interest (interest is generally non-taxable) ...
Your scenario is not “buy, borrow, die” as a core concept of that meme is you take advantage of the stepped-up basis upon death and the estate pays the interest. With your scenario the person imght have an interest payment of 50 million + the original 100 million, so now they have to sell enough stock to pay the 150 million and the 23-36% taxes on the gain (depending on the state they are located in - obviously different for countries other than the USA). That isn’t estate planning, that is hoping your stocks really go up and that the loan doesn’t come due in a downturn like 2008.
>"oh no my art lost value!"
That trick where for example, where someone would donate some painting to a museum and pay someone to say the donation is with N million, might have worked at some point in time, but that kind of thing is pretty much guaranteed to get an audit these days from what I have read and I would be very careful trying to do that.
A variant of the "buy, borrow, die" which some claim is done is basically that a bank essentially becomes a minority shareholder of the estate for giving the money. Though I recall one CPA who dealt in this area replying that none of the family offices he knew would likely be interested in this approach - people like Goldman Sachs are not your friends.
Ironically, a wealth tax of 1% is equivalent to 20% of the risk free earnings on that wealth.
This is simultaneously incredibly condescending and hopelessly naive. Politicians understand perfectly well that a 1% wealth tax is not a small tax on wealthy individuals. That's the whole point. They are engaging in basic political rhetoric when they say things like "a mere 1% tax".
It's an attempt at muddying the waters. It's what he excels at. This is the same guy who called Sam Altman "a force of nature". That is his level of judgement.
I don’t follow the debate and situation in the US that closely but isn’t (part of) the point of wealth tax to offset the fact that rich people are routinely avoiding paying income tax and taxes in general? Thus even if we assume the simplistic conversion here, it’s not that they’re moved from 40->60 bracket but more like <10 -> <30 ?
Yes. And that wealthy individuals are avoiding taxes via things like buy -> borrow -> die, in which high stock valuations that increase but are not sold are not ever taxed, and roll over the taxation potential upon death to their current value. Thus by borrowing against them until death, the inheritor will inherit with a tax basis at the current value upon receipt and thus all taxes are avoided. In which case the tax would go from 0% to 20% (functionally a small amount may be sold to pay interest, so really assume 1% or 2% taxes default). The horror!
Buy borrow die as you describe still ends up with a 40% estate tax. Most uber wealthy want to avoid the estate tax so they utilize trusts, which cant die. Really the people who benefit the most from buy borrow die are those with 10-50 million. Not enough to pay serious estate tax because of the exemption. Above that everyone uses trusts which work differently. Not that the trusts dont have their own loopholes.
Indeed, the ultra-wealthy pay far less than 40% effective estate tax. Seems closer to 15% due to creative accounting, which is further reduced to 6.8% by charitable contributions:
> Specifically, for single decedents, estate taxes paid equal 6.8% of the value of Forbes wealth at death. The value of their gross estate is 39% of the Forbes estimate of their wealth. This large gap, already noted in earlier work (Raub et al., 2010), is likely to reflect the various techniques available to high-net-worth individuals to undervalue assets in the context of the estate tax. Taxable estate is then 45% of gross estate (due to deductions primarily gifts to charities) and on that base the tax rate is 39% (Balkir et al., 2025, Table 4 Panel B).
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34170/w341...
The wealth tax argument actually is because our current 2 party political system is set up to where politicians effectively "pay" their corporate constituency with their discretionary spending, which has increased the national debt substantially.
The only way this system can continue is if we increase the receipts (aka tax revenue).
The political class has very wisely targeted "the wealthy," who are capable of tactically avoiding taxes, but as always it will eventually include the middle class who will ultimately be paying the tax. From their standpoint they will popularize this tactic because it will work
This is being sold as class warfare, but its really the evolution of our political system into an unsustainable system of patronage with public funds.
We have plenty of other problems like "buy, borrow, die" (discussed elsewhere in this thread), but ultimately the wealth tax stems from needing more public funds, which stems from politicians spending all of our money.
The idea that rich people don't pay taxes is a myth. The top 5% richest people in America account for 60% of all of the federal income tax. The bottom 50% on the other hand only account for a total of 3%.
When Elon sold a bunch of Tesla stock in 2021 he paid $11 Billion in capital gains tax on it... That's more than entire cities worth of people combined would ever pay for the rest of their lives.
Can you share a source? Of course the top 5% of _earners_ would pay more, but that's not necessarily the same crew as the top 5% in net worth. And 5% is a large share of the population. I'd be more interested in the top 1% of 1% in terms of wealth.
Indeed GP is falsely equating "wealthiest" with "highest taxable income".
They are likely referring to a stat like this: https://usafacts.org/articles/who-pays-the-most-income-tax/
> The top 5% richest people in America account for 60% of all of the federal income tax
I see this repeated all the time and it's worthless without context. What percent of all income do the top 5% earn? What's their share of national wealth?
It’s a stupid thought-terminating quip entirely centered around a superficial “one number bigger than other” gotcha.
We live in a society where the wealthiest have orders of magnitude more wealth than everyone else. The taxes they pay are not proportional to that wealth, period.
5% richest includes hand to mouth workers earning $100k.
95th percentile is around $150k individual and $330k joint income.
No it's just harder to accurately tax each and every form of wealth so we proxy it by taxing income.
Wealthy people pay a lot of taxes in the USA. If they aren't routinely avoiding paying income tax and taxes in general, how could that be the point?
It may be more realistic to view this in terms of elite power struggle. There are some constituencies that have found their way into positions of some power -- in government and public service -- that are in conflict with other elites, who have found some power in private enterprise. These groups battle for control of things. One strategy in the battle is managing the other group's access to money.
It's not clear from any kind of first principles, that we are better off with government allocation of a large portion of the society's capital. That hasn't historically been a big winner. Private ordering seems to net out a higher quality of life overall, even with income inequality.
There is a bit more to the story than a 1% wealth being "equivalent" to a 20% income tax. The primary difference is that unrealized gains are taxed by a wealth tax. We need a mechanism for assets to be sold by the richest in society. If those with assets keep accruing more assets the median person will suffer. When we're talking about real assets (housing, retail shops, warehouses, land) we don't need to be concerned about capital flight. The assets are still there on the ground. Reducing the cost of those assets is exactly what we need to help a local economy.
That being said, the richest are effectively _not_ paying the highest marginal tax rate considering all the tax structuring they do. Claiming that they would be paying the highest income tax in the world is misleading, for one. Secondly, the richest in the world _should be_ paying the highest income tax.
When more assets are sold than are bought, that leads to the destruction of assets on a broad scale. It's the economic equivalent of eating one's seed corn. This would not be good for the median person. You can and should tax land (meaning the land value component of real estate in general) and natural resources more generally, but that's an entirely different game: it has next to nothing to do with wealth taxes as generally understood.
This claim is plain malicious. Of course falling asset prices would be excellent for the median person, since they would be less extremely priced out of everywhere. This is one of the central benefits of a wealth tax.
> When more assets are sold than are bought
How does this make sense? If Johnny sells 5 cars, that means 5 cars were bought. How can Johnny sell more cars than are being bought? Do you mean that Johnny has more cars to sell than are being bought?
It's like a hot potato where people want to sell assets over buying them. Obviously at any given moment there are as many buyers as sellers, but this is exactly why trying to force people to sell at rock bottom prices brings widespread asset destruction.
Ya, but if there are way more sellers than buyers that means that prices are inflated. If prices were lower there would be more buyers, but sellers want to keep their asset prices inflated so they don't lower prices. Assets that are priced properly don't have the problem of having too many sellers. I think calling it asset destruction is slightly disingenuous. Just because the price is lower doesn't mean the asset is destroyed. Even if we are talking about a stock selling for 50% less, it is still a share in company ownership.
Who is forcing anyone to sell at rock bottom?
For a given transaction after the fact that’s true.
But consider 5 people wanting to buy Richards 1 car.
I think that’s actually what they meant… although I agree w you.
If those with assets keep accruing more assets the median person will suffer.
How will they suffer? The people with assets, to realize a benefit from them, have to spend money. If they don't spend the money, then what's the problem?
> You can tell from the way they talk about the subject that they don't understand the momentousness of what they're proposing.
All proposals focus on ultra-wealthy individuals. This "momentousness" wouldn't really touch the absolute vast majority of the taxpayers.
But, yeah, I bet the targeted people are getting nervous.
the author part of them. Condescending dick
It's funny, because even though he got the math right, PG got the reasoning completely wrong.
> Each 1% of wealth tax is equivalent to 20% of income tax.
Yes, this is the right part. Taxing wealth at 1% is equivalent to taxing income at 20-25% (depending on which return you count as baseline)
> It's clear that politicians don't get this from the way they talk about a "mere 1%" wealth tax. None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate
On the opposite, they understand it right, and PG is completely wrong here: it's not about adding income tax rate to someone that already pay income taxes, it's about making wealthy people, who don't currently pay this tax rate, pay the same rate as people living from their income.
> So in the median case, a state adding an additional 20% in income tax would have a total marginal tax rate of 37% + 4.75% + 20%, or 61.75%.
Bezos, Musk, Zuck and the likes (or even PG himself, likely) don't pay 40% tax on their wealth growth, they currently pays 0%.
In fact, to make them pay as much tax as their employees, there should be a 2% wealth tax, not 1%. Hence, a “mere 1%” is in fact a very generous proposal by leftists politicians and economists, as it would still mean the wealthy only get half the rate of working people.
I really like the way you framed it. I've never really been against a wealth tax but making it equivalent to income feels fair to me. I don't think the math works out with rates where they are today, though.
I guess the simplest approach is, if you're making money, it should be taxed fairly, regardless of how you're making it.
The trick is clarifying that "making money" means "increasing your wealth". Currently there are many ways of increasing wealth that don't "count" as making money.
Oh he understands the reasoning. He is one of the people who would be subject to the tax :) The wealthy writing essays on how to not infringe upon their wealth is nothing new, although it did go out of favor in the Carnegie-Rockefeller era when they competed to see who could do more public-good with their immense fortunes before their shoving off the mortal coil. Looks like the ultrawealthy currying sentiment to preserve ultrawealthy wealth at any expense is back in vogue.
> it's not about adding income tax rate to someone that already pay income taxes, it's about making wealthy people, who don't currently pay this tax rate, pay the same rate as people living from their income.
That's exactly it. I've been really shocked at the willful ignorance (or deceit) coming from the billionaire class on this. I mean, OBVIOUSLY the practical operation of the tax regime is unfair at the top end. If you put a billion dollars in assets somewhere, almost any asset (including e.g. stock in a company you can't sell because you need to own it), growth of that asset is (1) trivially liquid via loans[1] or deals and (2) COMPLETELY UNTAXABLE IN PRACTICE because there's never (ever!) going to be a point where it's traded or converted in such a way that it becomes a "capital gain".
[1] e.g. Bezos goes to Citi or whoever and writes up a contract for a $100M loan to be collateralized with ever-appreciating AMZN shares, likely at a deeply discounted rate (low risk, plus the "keep Jeff in the rolodex" benefit to the bank) then pays it back on schedule with another loan taken out on his now-even-larger stake in AMZN. Who pays the tax here? It's not "income"!
I am shocked that you are shocked. Billionaires have always said or done anything they can to maximize their wealth.
> pay 40℅ tax
Offtopic but I thought your percent looked weird. Turns out, that's the "care of" symbol (℅, U+2105) and not percent (%, U+0025).
Fixed, thanks.
I had noticed something was off when proofreading but I didn't know this symbol and I couldn't explain what I did wrong so I assumed it must have been a graphics glitch.
TIL about the “care of” symbol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_of
>Bezos, Musk, Zuck and the likes (or even PG himself, likely) don't pay 40% tax on their wealth growth, they currently pays 0%.
No one should pay taxes on "wealth growth" because it's not realized. They paid income taxes on the shares once they received them, and will pay capital gains taxes once they sell them.
>In fact, to make them pay as much tax as their employees, there should be a 2% wealth tax, not 1%. Hence, a “mere 1%” is in fact a very generous proposal by leftists politicians and economists, as it would still mean the wealthy only get half the rate of working people.
They paid the same tax as their employees once they received the stocks. They will pay the same capital gains taxes as their employees once they sell.
> In fact, to make them pay as much tax as their employees, there should be a 2% wealth tax, not 1%.
Indeed.
Andrew Mellon writing in 1924 "Taxation: The People’s Business.": "The fairness of taxing more lightly incomes from wages, salaries and professional services than the incomes from business or from investments is beyond question. In the first case, the income is uncertain and limited in duration; sickness or death destroys it, and old age diminishes it. In the other, the source of income continues; the income may be disposed of during a man’s life, and it descends to his heirs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mellon
Via "Our Tax System Should Make You Furious" (interview with a Boston College Law School professor who specializes in tax law and estate planning):
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
What mostly bothers me is that this is likely to start out as "tax the wealth of the rich" and it will become tax all wealth. Including my pension pot! In the UK the only people safe from that kind of nonsense will be public sector employees. Because guess what, their pension pots don't exist, they are just tax payer / debt funded liabilities.
Heck, it's even started in the UK with labour killing off salary sacrifice pensions, everyone one I know was reliant on those to be able to retire, but who gives a shit, we are private sector and we have no union!
I'm on a rant here, forgive me.
There's a related calculation you can do -- what percent of your net worth is your employability? Take your salary, divide by 0.05 (or multiply by 20) -- if you had that much additional wealth earning 5%, you could replace your job's income.
For most people their ability to earn is by far their largest asset. You can kind of get a feel for how difficult it is to bootstrap into generational wealth if you think about the math -- it takes time to replace that earnings portion of your own balance sheet, and even more to well replace it; a lot has to go right in the interim.
The issue at hand is the incredibly wealthy can pay close to nothing in income tax because they often borrow on their collateral vs. sell their holdings. Hence that 1% that PG equates to 20% tax is quite fair. Look at what Buffet says the percentage he pays is: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-view-taxes-vs-.... Furthermore afaict the state proposals usually have a floor on how much of your wealth is taxed. I'm personally against the one time wealth tax by California for several reason but it only impacts those with a net worth of >= 1 billion.
Some thoughts I have been having recently
1. Wealthy more or less means able to live off the investments (passive income). Usually it means live off the interest of the interest (generally assessed as 8 million bucks nest egg)
2. It’s an obvious logical step but it is literally impossible for everyone to be independently wealthy. As in everyone cannot have a passive income.
3. So this debate just chnages when we ask “how do we make everyone wealthy” we can’t given the definition we have.
4. So we have to change the definition
5. How can we make everyone in society share fairly in the wealth that society has?
6. What if we made it much harder for wealth to Snowball into more wealth pulling it away from middle class
7. What if instead of a foolish wealth tax where we assess wealth, we stick to the “freely entered into transaction situation”
8. So Capital Gains taxes at same rates as income Also tax the “borrow till you die” idea - over a certain yearly amount, borrowing against your assets (ie Deutsche Bank lending you 100M against 1M shares of Blurb corporation should be treated as income just as if you sold the shares.)
I know that get hard but in the end we need money to circulate.
That’s how everyone shares
I still haven't heard a solid explanation of how taxing loans as "income" is going to work.
Being able to borrow against assets is a pretty essential part of the present-day economy. Almost everybody does it, from the very poorest taking out a car-title loan (however ill-advised) to middle-class people with home equity loans to medium sized businesses and farms who often have loans against their entire assets in order to buy more equipment or keep their operations going.
> I still haven't heard a solid explanation of how taxing loans as "income" is going to work.
The idea is that taking a secured loan out using an asset as collateral would be a taxable event for that asset.
That is to say, if you buy a house for $400,000 and it appreciates to be worth $850,000 then take a home equity loan out against the house, you would owe capital gains on the $450,000 appreciation.
With the current $250,000 capital gains exclusion for primary residence, this would result in ~$30,000 of capital gains tax.
> The idea is that taking a secured loan out using an asset as collateral would be a taxable event for that asset.
Doesn't that puts valuations in the hands of people who could conspire to manipulate them, creating false data points?
For example, suppose you bought something for $25 a long time ago, and it has, very unofficially, appreciated to ~$100.
I could lend you $100, and the contract will say that I'm only asking for it to be partially secured with collateral, which will be, oh that "$25" asset which obviously hasn't appreciated in value at all. Poof, no gains tax.
I think the real issue here has to do with dodges in the Estate Tax, which is the endgame that these delaying games are meant to reach.
That’s an interesting take.
I certainly agree with the estate / inheritance tax (the main issue is “resetting” the value to market at point of inheritance)
But as for the valuation problem I think that can only stretch so far. If you put up a million shares of $TechFirm as collateral for a loan to buy a yacht, it’s hard to claim they aren’t worth what the NYSE listed them as. If instead you put up 250,000 shares as partial collateral the bank has to put the missing collateral on its balance sheet (else some one is committing fraud)
The thing is it’s common. We on HN know all about “borrow till you die”, that Trump got Mar-a-lago valued at a billion dollars. The problem is not banks doing favours for valued clients, it’s so common and normalised that we don’t notice.
My not-too-strategic thinking is that maybe we don't have to solve the tricky problem of loans, if we merely close the enormous final tax dodge that they're all aiming for.
I'm not an expert in this, but I thought one of the biggest arguments for why a wealth tax is needed the whole "buy, borrow, die" thing where the ultra rich can use their assets as collateral to take out a never ending series of ultra low interest loans until they die and then have most of the tax burden of selling assets to pay off those loans wiped out because the tax code is much more favorable to selling assets to pay off the debt of someone's estate.
If (big if) I'm remembering that correctly, I don't get why we just go after the problem directly and do something like treat putting down collateral for these type of loans as a taxable event. I'm sure it's not as straight forward as it sounds, but I can't imagine it'd be more convoluted that needing to track the wealth of every high net worth individual.
Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but I actually don't care if Jeff Bezos' net worth went up by $5 billion because Amazon had a good day in the market. If the shares are just sitting in an account doing nothing other than proving ownership it's all kind of just numbers in a computer, IMO. A painting is probably a better example than stock, but if I have a painting on my wall that was worth $1 million dollars yesterday and today it's worth $10 million that change in valuation is essentially meaningless as long as the only thing the painting is doing is hanging on my wall.
What I do care about is when he's able to access the cash value of that $5 billion of Amazon stock without paying the taxes that would come along with selling the stock. If he wants to leave $5 billion in Amazon stock just sitting in his account doing nothing until the day he dies, that's totally fine, but the second he puts it up for collateral we should tax that. I think this has the added benefit of simplifying things by avoiding a lot of questions around fair valuation of assets. If I have a $10 million dollar one of a kind painting on my wall that I'm never planning on selling, it's kind of hard to put a valuation on that and it can be easily manipulated by finding the right appraiser. If I put a painting up as collateral for a $10 million loan it becomes a lot harder for the owner to argue that it's actually worthless or the IRS to argue that it's actually worth $1 billion.
This is exactly the reason -- or a tax against borrowing against assets once your net worth is high enough -- or not reseting capital gains at death. The entire system is currently basically rigged such that these ultra rich people pay no taxes.
>why a wealth tax is needed the whole "buy, borrow, die" thing [...]
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239802
Moreover if the bug is that income isn't tax at death, why not just fix that bug? Otherwise it's like arguing: "wow there are people in poverty? Better have a communist revolution to fix that!"
I would love, LOVE to pay 20% in taxes! Goes without saying, I work for a living and have far less wealth and power compared to PG.
I think there is kind of a breakdown in social order here. If society allows you to become the chief, it ought to also impose upon you a burden, an obligation, to wield your power over the tribe fairly, generously. To care for the weak, to make sure that everyone benefits, to ensure that things stay stable and safe under your leadership... The standard is higher, not lower. The sacrifice is greater, not lesser.
It is absolutely bizarre and you can see exactly thew way PG, and other like him, are thinking. They all want to have this immense power (and it truly is immense, more immense than ever in modern history!) but they want none of the obligation, none of the responsibility.
Even asking for 20 percent is too much, apparently.
It's really sick.
There's a secondary side effect of wealth taxes: they redirect investments (I'm Argentinian and we have wealth taxes).
Investments shift to things whose tax value updates slowly, for example property which typically adjusted more slowly than other financial assets. This tends to rise property prices and concentrate ownership.
It causes other distortions in allocation depending on the tax details, but wealthy people tend to adjust more aggressively to changing conditions.
In Norway the valuation of publicly listed stock companies is different than the valuation of non-traded companies (for publicly traded stocks it's the market value, while for the other companies it's their assets minus debt, so usually roughly 10x smaller). The effect of this is increased investment in small and medium sized companies compared to keeping the money passively in index founds.
> This tends to rise property prices and concentrate ownership.
We are already there in US. Real estate is already controlled by companies, and rental costs are through the roof.
The bigger difference between an income tax and a wealth tax isn't the numbers. A wealth tax, for better or worse requires some realization of paper gains that very wealthy folks normally go to great lengths to avoid because their wealth is largely based on a broadly shared polite fiction. So imposing some realization of that wealth requires accountability that doesn't always pan out.
A much more interesting formula would be how to convert between income and income tax - you'd think it worked according to the superficial bracket system, but in fact, it works along the lines of going to 0 at the top.
P.S. a wealth tax is a property tax. They have existed in the US since before the income tax (which was originally considered unconstitutional by its opponents).
I think the limit it can reach without carried forward losses is 20% because that's the top long-term capital gains tax rate. The other thing I can think of is if you sell a QSBS business, then your capital gains are taxed at 0, and you wouldn't pay income tax at all on that money either. So it's in theory possible that someone could make millions tax free from selling a business, but that's a rare case and one the tax code explicitly allows for.
You can get a loan from a bank against your assets and spend only the loan. I think that's how it goes to zero.
>So it's in theory possible that someone could make millions tax free from selling a business, but that's a rare case and one the tax code explicitly allows for.
These guys have whole offices working to figure out how their day to day expenses can be converted into stuff like "selling a business." ;-)
There have been a few proposals to close that loophole. The main reason it exists is because debt isn't counted as income since it has to be repaid.
Yes, even if it never is. But you have to realize that these proposals to close loopholes are massive tax increases, not technicalities.
> It's clear that politicians don't get this from the way they talk about a "mere 1%" wealth tax. None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing. [2]
This is the wrong way of thinking about it. It's not adding 20% to an already taxed entity, it's adding taxes where there weren't before. Adding 20% on top of the income tax would indeed be controversial. In his framing the rate of return is effectively untaxed income, so it would be more accurate to say that this is like adding income tax to a currently untaxed income stream.
Isn't PG's conflation of Denmark's high income tax with a proposed wealth tax a clear flaw in his math and argument re: "the highest taxes in the world"? Why wouldn't you instead compare to other countries that also have both income and wealth taxes?
As a layman, bringing up a purely income based argument with Denmark, seemed to be an odd juxtaposition.
So make income tax a deduction on a wealth tax, and avoid penalizing people who do indeed pay top marginal rate income tax on a large salary/bonus.
Given that the ultrarich pay very little to no income tax then Paul’s argument is “don’t increase my income tax from unnoticeable to 20%”
You probably mean that incomes taxes should be subtracted from wealth taxes? (I don't know that "deduction" is right technical term). That sounds like a good idea, and should probably also include subtracting out capital gains taxes as well. So if you had a $500,000 calculated income tax liability, and a $600,000 calculated wealth tax liability, you would only end up paying $600,000 in taxes (instead of $1,100,000).
...that does seem like it would seem to alleviate PG's concerns about adding "a mere 20%" to the income tax rate.$tax_paid = max($income_tax_liability + $capital_gain_tax_liability, $wealth_tax_liability)
True enough, but it doesn't address the motivation or the issues presented by California's proposed wealth tax.
It's a big democracy red flag when a majority wants to take a lot from a tiny minority; the moral hazard of the unfairness is that it's unclear where this ends. (Saying "one-time" and "1%" are trying to limit that risk)
It's a democracy red flag when an unpopular minority is vilified as the cause of society's problems. It short-circuits real policy making and distracts from real issues.
The bargain of private wealth is that it's better at innovation that should spread widely -- if it's subject to competition and does not export costs.
One problem is that one of the best investments is to change the law to reduce competition, increase market power, and export costs -- i.e., to weaken politics.
Another is that wealth used to mostly invest locally (information and transaction costs), so locals would see some benefit. No longer.
Finally, as an accelerant, enterprises are made of legions of managers and experts, who now compete more than ever; they would lose that competition by supporting less extractive policies or gentler politics.
Net result is that wealth seems not productive but extractive, and there is no negative feedback to reduce that.
Once the grand gambit of goodwill is lost, it cannot be recovered for at least a generation, but there's no real feedback to prevent that. The political viability of something like a wealth tax is just an early indicator.
Wealthy people are taking food out of my mouth by driving up asset prices, and deploying capital in ways that will never benefit me, either in employment or in quality of life. The premise of reducing taxes on wealthy people was that everyone would broadly benefit. This has not happened. The contract is broken. I want my money back.
> It's a big democracy red flag when a majority wants to take a lot from a tiny minority
It’s not “taking”. The rich give out some money so the society has a higher probability to stay peaceful. or a violent revolution may happen.
This is really a win win situation
> It's a big democracy red flag when a majority wants to take a lot from a tiny minority
not to forget that the inverse is also bad; generally people shouldn't take from each other
> It's a big democracy red flag when a majority wants to take a lot from a tiny minority; the moral hazard of the unfairness is that it's unclear where this ends. (Saying "one-time" and "1%" are trying to limit that risk)
In the absence of any other considerations, I'd agree with you. However, the last half-century has seen that same tiny minority taking nearly all productivity gains from the rest, to the point that wealth inequality is greater now than during the first gilded age, so I have somewhat less sympathy for the tiny minority when the rest want to claw some of that back.
> It's a democracy red flag when an unpopular minority is vilified as the cause of society's problems. It short-circuits real policy making and distracts from real issues.
It's less of a red flag when that unpopular minority is the cause of society's problems. The ultra-wealthy have commandeered government to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us.
We have massive consolidation of markets and media due to lobbying for deregulation and against enforcing anti-trust laws. We have further wealth concentration, the likes of which exceeds even the first gilded age at the hands of massive tax cuts and loopholes predominantly benefiting only the wealthiest, while also cutting tax enforcement personnel, making it easier to get away with tax evasion. Of course, in the face of the massive budget deficits resulting from those tax cuts, we make cuts to important social programs affecting many (and with largely positive ROI) while protecting subsidies to some of the most profitable businesses on the planet and leaping at any chance to start wars abroad whenever we need to distract from embarrassments at home. We have lax enforcement of labor laws which would allow workers to organize and demand higher wages, while at the same time passing unconstitutional laws at the state level which try to prevent organized labor in the first place. We have not only allowed the federal minimum wage to lag significantly behind inflation, but we have lobbying groups coming out of the woodwork to stop any proposed increase. When we have large economic crises caused by the malfeasance of the wealthiest of the wealthy, our corrupt Congress passes large bail-outs for the culprits while telling the majority of us to suck it up and tighten our belts. Of course, our consolidated media landscape increasingly obfuscates the real problems, presenting alternate boogeymen like immigrants so the downward spiral continues.
Allowing so much wealth to concentrate in the hands of a tiny minority is itself a giant democracy red flag. The US is on the cusp of losing its democracy as a direct result, damaging global security and markets in its death throes. The mere existence of billionaires and their corrupting influence on government is the issue.
You don’t need to teach anyone about this. The wealth tax should apply to extremely wealthy people, not everyone.
If you accumulated a fortune, there was some skill at play. There was also considerable luck and some exploitation. The wealth tax is a way of paying back for the luck and exploitation.
You will still be extremely wealthy.
Paul wants to play the fairness card. Life is not fair and those who accumulated massive fortunes won the lottery. Don’t let the massively rich conflate issues. Don’t get fooled.
As others have mentioned this is wrong. Here's 3 accounts on how it is so:
1- Fundamentally, they are magnitudes of different units, one is tax/income, the other is tax/wealth/time. Not only is the denominator different, one being calculated over income, the other over wealth, but there is an additional inverse time factor.
In income tax, whether the period is yearly or monthly or hourly, is an administrative matter that doesn't materially change the rate, 1%/month is the same as 12%/month, however in wealth tax, 1% wealth tax per year is not the same as 1% wealth tax per month. In many respects one might consider wealth tax to be a second order derivative of income with respect to time. Which is again very similar to a progressive income tax. Anyone that studied polynomials knows that there is no such equivalence between ax and bx^2, they are irreducible mathematical forms.
2)Trivially, in the scenario Paul proposed, Wealth tax is comparable to income tax only with respect to capital gains. That is, if he did find an equivalence between income tax and wealth tax for capital gains (which he didn't), income tax would still apply non capital gain taxes. But I will concede that there may be an argument that, if such an equivalence were found, it could be considered that there exists an Income Tax which will always yield more tax than another specific wealth tax.
3) The equivalence between wealth and income tax cannot be linear. The example given applied to 1% wealth tax and was compared to 20%, and a risk free interest of 5%. If the wealth tax were of 2%, 5% or 10%, would that be equivalent to 40%, 100%, and 200% income tax respectively? The last one is especially ridiculous.
What's wrong with a 20% tax? We who make a living from labor instead of capital pay more than that.
Paul tries to frame it as an increase of 20% in the tax rate, but in reality the increase is from 0% to 20%, and it's hard to see why that's unfair.
The reason I say it's currently 0% is of course that for the wealthy most of these 5% gains are unrealized (e.g. inflation in the value of their assets) and untaxed.
> most of these 5% gains are unrealized (e.g. inflation in the value of their assets) and untaxed.
The worst part is that even when they need to realize their profits, they have schemes that allow them to avoid taxes (guess how much taxes Musk paid for his $20B realized profits from his Tesla shares he sold to buy Twitter).
But strangely politicians generally aren't pushing for targeted corrections to reduce those loopholes-- e.g. impugning realizing gains when you take a loan on assets beyond certain thresholds just as currently happens when you create a constructive sale with options trades. When assets are encumbered by loans or as collateral one could force the tax realization of gains at some rate which then adjusts the cost basis. The distortionary effect of this policy would be greatly diminished by the fact that everyone could just choose to not use their assets in this way.
Instead, the are running straight for the full on land grab while distracting people with the details of technical loopholes of comparatively small consequence.
> But strangely politicians generally aren't pushing for targeted corrections to reduce those loopholes
You are just not paying attention enough. They do talk about loopholes, and push to close them during the legislative process.
They just don't talk about the loopholes details a lot because you don't get elected by talking about technical details in the tax code: “Force the tax realization of gains at some rate which then adjusts the cost basis when assets are encumbered by loans or as collateral” isn't a slogan that makes you win an election.
Income (returns) are not guaranteed. Go for progressive capital gains if that’s what you want. A wealth tax is a crazy bad idea.
Not everybody uses money to make more money, Paul. Most people work, get paid, and spend the money on their needs. In other words, you are in a position to care about the question, it's OK if you are taxed a bit more.
I think 1% wealth tax should be a replacement for income tax. That way only the wealthy will pay taxes.
I think that is the glaring hole here - via an insane number of instruments from the various investments, they can reduce their tax liability (fed and state) to be very close to 0%. I believe a main idea of the wealth tax is to get around the insanely complicated tax code w/ all its loopholes.
A national sales tax also gets around the insanely complicated tax code without government confiscation of wealth. Regardless of how it is earned money eventually gets spent. Rich people spend far more than lower incomes so they pay more taxes. If they pass their wealth on it will still eventually get spent by somebody. That fixes the stepped basis problem of inheritance. If they use equity to get loans they are still spending money so it fixes that problem too. It is also easier and less costly to collect and enforce. No special forms for specific types of income to make sure you are getting taxed enough and no army of IRS agents to check that everybody is following the tax code.
The most common opposition to replacing income tax with a sales tax is saying it is regressive because "poor" people will need to spend a larger portion of their income on taxes than a wealthy person. Ok, so don't food or primary residence. A poor person isn't buying a $300,000 car or a second home. The best part is that if somebody is having a hard time getting by, every dollar they earn can be saved instead of giving Uncle Sam a short term loan until tax day.
How do you propose we measure a person's wealth, when wealth is easily hidden? When it needs to be done now, it is usually a years long audit.
A lot of countries require you to declare your total wealth on your tax forms. Then once someone gets audited, that gets checked. Obviously it’s possible to hide it, but that in itself is a crime, and not everyone is willing to risk going to jail over paying taxes.
> A lot of countries require you to declare your total wealth on your tax forms.
If you own shares of $MCD, you can get wealth taking share prices and shares owned.
But if own a McDonald's franchise, how do you measure the 'wealth' of it? Annual profit? Last x years profit, averaged?
Comparable sales. Discounted cash flow model. There are many ways.
The first step we need to take is to invest in the IRS. Every dollar invested in the IRS returns between $5-9. Couple that with fines that offset the cost of auditing, and "hidden wealth" becomes a liability too expensive for people to bother with.
> It's clear that politicians don't get this from the way they talk about a "mere 1%" wealth tax. None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing. [2]
But it's not "mathematically the same thing". Taking the 100 dollars allegory Paul raises, for that allegory to be based in reality, someone would need to have 20x their annual salary in wealth. The median salary in the US is 59K per annum. For the 100 dollars allegory to work out to a 20% income tax equivalence, people would need to have just over a million dollars sitting in their bank account. The average American net worth is more like 48K (being generous), which is under a year's salary, with a tonne of people also just living permanently in debt (negative wealth). Interestingly, would a wealth tax mean negative tax (free money) for those many in America living in debt?
The fatal flaw in PG's argument is that is doesn't mention spending at all.
If you're spending your entire income on things like food and rent, then a 1% wealth tax corresponds to 0% income tax.
If you're spending your entire income on investment, then there's a calculation like PG's to be made to compute an equivalent income tax rate. But then we're talking about someone who doesn't need the money. This isn't even about rich vs. poor - you can have a high income and spend it all as you make it, like if you throw a huge party every week, or make a yearly trip into space. But if not, then it's just an ever growing number on your bank statement, and the only reason you care about it being 20% higher is because you're comparing it to other people's bank statements.
From the article:
Currently the country with the highest marginal income tax rate is Denmark, at 60.5%. The top US federal tax rate is 37%, and the median state income tax rate is Oklahoma's, which is 4.75%. So in the median case, a state adding an additional 20% in income tax would have a total marginal tax rate of 37% + 4.75% + 20%, or 61.75%. [3]
In the median case, US state politicians talking about adding a "mere 1%" wealth tax are talking about causing the residents of their state to have the highest taxes in the world. That's not the sort of decision you make lightly.
It should be noted that the marginal tax rate for high earners in the USA was higher than 60% from the 1930s through the 1970s.
Chart here: https://www.hrblock.com/tax-center/newsroom/income/the-histo...
If you are wealthy enough, you can live off of untaxed loans from your “unrealized” gains, and never pay taxes on that money at any rate. Meanwhile, I am paying an effective tax rate of around 35%.
The principle is simple: if you are spending the money, your gains are realized, and you should pay taxes.
Loans against unrealized gains should just be taxed directly as income. Not indirectly creating more loopholes. Same way stock buybacks should be taxed at the same rate as short term capital gains.
Yes let's encourage more risky behavior! Absolutely braindead takes.
This sort of proposal would establish a minimum 35 % return in any project. Thus halting investment entirely
Let's put this in perspective. I'm currently going to collaterize a few hundred thousand in equity to take a loan to develop homes in my very housing short city of Portland. My calculated return is 40%. This is an excellent return..
It this were taxed then my initial loan would have to be 40% larger which means all my profit would go into paying that back, which means this project never gets done.
You are already going to get the money once the homes are sold and the capital gains are realized. Why is everyone so greedy? You essentially want to tax twice
The point is you should realize your gains before you reinvest the money. Circular borrowing causes asset bubbles. You could collateralize against OTHER assets, but unrealized gains you should be paying taxes on if you are borrowing against them. It's really just closing a loophole. If the loophole is BIG enough, the you could lower the rate for everyone!
Taxation would only worsen the bubble as people are left unable to pay.
Again the tax rate sets a minimum return. These high returns encourage too much risk.
Collateralizing other assets is the standard way in which capital grows. I don't see how equities and any different than homes.
There is no 'circular' borrowing other than the normal creation of money through lending
2008 was literally people getting mortgages on unrealized gains, and then getting more loans. Even if the market wouldn't support the sale, they borrow against it and then get another load and causing an asset bubble. Its not ancient history.
My issue is singling out stocks for this. Try telling people they're laying taxes on their heloc and that this is now income so their 300k heloc cash out now puts them in the highest tax bracket! Good luck
Of course people taking out equity cash for investments are actually putting the money for productive use.
How about there's no capital gains tax on equity if it's rolled into another investment of any kind. Eliminate the like kind nonsense. Tax only consumption income.
If I buy a home, I’m likely going to use saved post-tax income. What makes the money you’re using special?
Im building more homes in a market lacking homes where no outside group wants to invest. If you're building more homes on your property, by all means. No one is though and people are being priced out.
Just to be clear: you think you deserve a tax break for becoming a for-profit landlord? Isn’t the money you’re going to make by renting the homes sufficient incentive? Why should you also get a tax break?
Wasn't planning on being a landlord and no... I think my tax treatment should count income in the traditional way.
This is an internet meme. Nobody really does this.
In order to pay zero taxes you’d need to know you’re about to die. Until then your debt would be growing faster than your wealth.
It's not excessive to charge a 1% wealth tax when the people paying it don't pay any income tax thanks to their financial engineering.
Here is a cool website showing Wealth, shown to scale.
His math is correct, but the conclusion is wrong.
Income is money that comes from actually laboring and contributing to society. Wealth tax is tax from sitting on your ass doing nothing.
Also, taxes don’t have to be a flat percentage. Like income tax, a good wealth tax would be progressive. Only wealth beyond a certain amount would be taxed, and the percentages would scale.
This is why we should have income taxes that are as low as possible, but still progressively scaled. We should similarly have a progressive scaling wealth tax, but it should be much harsher than the income tax because we want people to work.
> Wealth tax is tax from sitting on your ass doing nothing.
Related point is monetary system and monetary plumbing should be boring like electricity or water supply but because of distortions making money out of money has become the hottest thing.
As an aside, in Islam, people have to pay a 2.5% wealth tax annually for charity.[1]
This does make retiring a tad bit complicated. Say you've saved $3M and are ready to retire. That means each year you're spending $75K just to satisfy this tax.
[1] Depending on how your wealth is structured. Cash is 2.5%, but if you own, say, a business, you pay the tax on the value of the goods, not on the value of the building, hardware, etc. You don't pay Zakat on the house you live on. Agriculture is actually taxed at 10%, etc.
Yeah, in general the principle is that zakat isn't due on fixed assets, but on any inventory or cash you hold. So its a lot less onerous than a blanket wealth tax.
Anymore I think the question shouldn't be about some kind of economic fairness (the time value of money thing being discussed) but the idea that wealth accumulation is a disease that afflicts society. I don't think anyone should have the level of control or influence on others that having a billion dollars currently allows. If a millionaire gives $100 to a political candidate it probably doesn't require too much thought. It's impressive to note that a 10-billionaire can give $1M just as easily, and so we have a class of folks who can throw around influence, who can order a team of lawyers to do things, can employ their legion of sycophantic followers to harass people, or can threaten the employment of many people not-of-their-class because they can make decisions that threaten someone's employer's bottom line. And note that above I compared a millionaire to the 10-billionaire, but there are plenty of folks, especially around the planet, who economically live several orders of magnitude below the millionaire.
As a bit of an aside, "spending more time with family" is an often-used euphemism around someone being fired, but if you have more money than you know what to do with and you aren't using it to spend more time with those you love, then what on earth is it for?
I know this is tangential to your main point, but in the US, you can only give a max of $3,500 to a candidate per election cycle, for each the primaries and general election.
To give more financial support, you have to do independent, uncoordinated campaigning for the candidate. So you can spend a million dollars on ads saying to vote for a candidate, but you can't give that money to the candidate's campaign and the candidate can't coordinate with you. This is what Super PACs do.
I only write this because a lot of people are unclear on the rules. I'm not making an argument about billionaires.
That’s the law, yes, but in practice it’s murkier: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/08/super-pacs-raise-mi...
> In fact, not a single coordination investigation has ever resulted in a PAC being fined.
As one example see million dollar donations to inaugurations.
I wouldn't put that in the same category as campaign donations. That money won't help the candidate get elected. The money goes to the inaugural committee to pay for the event.
I'd put that in the broader category of doing something the president/politician likes in hopes of gaining favor.
With this administration there are even better ways to gain influence and money by doing things the president likes than donating to inauguration ceremonies. Become a known staunch Trump advocate, and you could become the Secretary of Defense, FBI Deputy Director, or head of DOGE. No experience necessary.
In current events: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5892633-lutnick-...
(Lutnick donated $5M to House GOP super PAC ahead of Epstein deposition)
How do you think society works without wealth accumulation? There would be no incentive to innovate to push forward. You wouldn’t have your iPhone, computer, or car. Want to see the result of societies that forbid wealth creation? Go to Cuba.
It's an interesting question. If we lived in a universe in which we weren't in fear of losing access to basic necessities of food, shelter, and healthcare, but had to work to have anything beyond those, what would happen? I don't truly know and I don't believe we have done the experiment anywhere. But I do know that the system we have not only produces innovative products but also corruption, oligopolies, and steamrolls over labor and the environment if not regulated.
I'm not naive enough to think communism is a magical answer (but Cuba is not some A/B experiment - the U.S. in particular has done a lot to make sure Cuba didn't succeed) - it ends up concentrating the wealth too. I would favor some form of democratic socialism, with leaders who can be kicked out if they abuse their power and limits on the influence of rich individuals and corporations.
On the latter, I think we forget that corporations are a legal construct intended to benefit society by allowing risk pooling - they are not people and should not be considered as such for things like free speech rights. Corporations should not be allowed to make political contributions in any way.
Wealth tax is highly impractical. Very high and inescapable death taxes is what we need. Like 80% after an initial exemption amount. https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/the-summer-slide-part-3-the-t... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mX5U5DNUfBc
There are all kinds of irrevocable trusts that exist to remove assets from your taxable estate so that they can be passed to heirs without paying estate tax. Raising the estate tax (which is already 40%) would just make planning to use these techniques more attractive.
The existence of perpetual trusts is solvable in a world that has decided to fix the insanity caused by intergenerational wealth transfer instead of propping it up. "This thing we could also eliminate stops us from eliminating this other thing" is a silly platform. Just eliminate them both.
Perpetual trusts are different from irrevocable trusts, which have legitimate use cases. I don't really see how irrevocable trusts would be gotten rid of. In most states all trusts are irrevocable by default and there is a huge body of law dealing with trusts. Getting rid of them is essentially impossible without huge changes in the political/legal system.
> Getting rid of them is essentially impossible without huge changes in the political/legal system.
So is getting rid of intergenerational wealth transfer. So since we're already dreaming about a new system that seems irrelevant.
> legitimate use cases
Intergenerational wealth transfer also has "legitimate use cases" if one gets to define "legitimate". I'm curious what legitimate cases you have in mind.
By “raising death taxes”, I meant comprehensively, eliminating loopholes, as the sources I linked discuss more at length.
Re: irrevocable trust, a cursory search revealed no legitimate use case imo, all use cases I see are proxies to skirt taxes or hide income/wealth. What would you consider a legitimate use case for one?
Your point re: case law is well taken, but per [2] up until a few decades ago there was a cat-and-mouse game between laws and tricks regarding inheritance wealth transfer. This stopped and it’s easier than ever to transfer > 10M tax free at or death, which has massive implications for wealth inequality.
That said I agree it’s extremely unlikely and have no hope that any of this will change.
> What would you consider a legitimate use case for one?
Setting aside money to pay for a relative who can't provide for themselves, protecting assets if you are professional who faces high chance of being sued (e.g. surgeon), providing for children from a first marriage if you get married and predecease your second spouse.
> Setting aside money to pay for a relative who can't provide for themselves
Wealth transfer.
> providing for children from a first marriage if you get married and predecease your second spouse
Wealth transfer.
> protecting assets if you are professional who faces high chance of being sued
Dodging responsibility for professional malpractice?
pg seems to think we would be scandalized by this math, when all I feel is “so?”.
The language politicians use to sell to a general public does not have any correlation to their understanding of the mechanics. The people proposing this policy entirely understand the ramifications. That is the point of the policy.
The average person is already subject to something like a wealth tax through property taxes, in addition to also needing to pay taxes on their income. Join the club pal.
> It's clear that politicians don't get this from the way they talk about a "mere 1%" wealth tax. None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing. [2]
I am fully against any wealth tax but 'Don't get this'?
Who says they don't get it. It doesn't serve their purpose so of course (like anyone selling) they are not going to disclose it.
Wow, I like to actually see the numbers laid out like this. Most of the ultra-wealthy pay almost nothing on their income taxes from investments because they have found ways to avoid capital gains, and even if they were paying long term capital gains rates of 15%, pg’s assertion that the wealth tax adds another 20% doesn’t seem unreasonable at all. If anything, it makes me think 1% is not nearly enough of a wealth tax!
If you follow his logic and believe that the ultra-wealthy pay too little tax (as e.g. Warren Buffett does), then a balanced approach is to set the tax rate to: "37% of income or 1.85% of wealth, whichever is higher".
This would close the gap between Buffett's tax rate and that of his secretary, but would not be the "highest taxes in the world" that PG decries.
I was waiting for him to make some point but then it ended up being that a wealth tax is like increasing regular income taxes by 20% which makes it seem like PG is trying to confuse people about what a wealth tax is designed to target. It's not targeting your wages or salary, or even your interest or dividends. It's primarily targeting unrealized gains on financial securities.
Maybe he should spend his time trying to work with these politicians to design something that is more fair? Like making it actually act as a tax on unrealized gains over $1B (so that it takes cost basis into consideration) OR make it so that if you need to sell some assets to pay the tax, you can writeoff the wealth tax you paid from your regular/capital-gains income so that you aren't taxed twice? There's a lot of actually useful stuff he could write about in this policy area instead of blogging about the financial equivalence between stocks and flows.
Here's a crucial mechanism that Paul Graham did not mention:
With a wealth tax using his calculation, the higher your returns, the lower the comparable income tax would be. If your returns are 10% you'll pay $1 on $10 capital gains which is 10% and you end up with $109. Conversely someone achieving a mere 1% cap gains would be essentially taxed for 100% of his return.
With income taxes it's usually the opposite: the more you earn, the higher the tax bracket you will be put into.
Somebody like Paul Graham surely has higher than 10% capital gains, otherwise he'd not be exactly a great investor.
Personally I'm against wealth taxes, I think capital gains taxes are a much more appropriate and fairer tool. I also think taxes in general are way too high, if you are part of the middle class and add up everything you pay in taxes, fees, insurance, duties and whatnot you can end up losing 70-90% of whatever you earn. It's extremely hard to actually accumulate wealth for the vast majority of people.
Well he does qualify this in his post, "The conversion rate of 20 comes from assuming that the risk-free rate of return is 5%."
This blog post is incredibly tasteless. Really Paul should take it down and get the butler to wipe the egg off his face
The wealth tax that we should have is a federal property tax, in the form of a land-value tax. A property tax is more enforceable and produces much better incentives than an income tax or capital gains tax or death tax or wealth taxes in other forms.
I think it's underestimated how important ease of enforcement is for taxes and laws in general. Laws that are hard to enforce require more powerful law enforcement agencies, more invasion of privacy, more punishment, more restriction of freedom. Enforcing a death tax, for example, necessarily requires limiting and tracking of all transfers of money or assets between people including personal gifts. A property tax merely requires keeping track of land ownership, which is a function governments already do, and in the worst case you can simply physically go to the land and see who is using it or seize it.
So, if we go with 2% wealth tax(instead of 1%) we can cut income tax offset -20%? Go do it right now.
Perhaps all taxes should be abolished and then a new one introduced: a transaction tax.
The question then remains, does the sender add a bit more before sending to move any given amount, or do they pay a given amount with the recipient getting less?
The system certainly scales well for net-worth and one's economic activity.
The question then remains - who/what is considered an "outside" party for a tax to operate in financial flows? It could work well in an agentic economy if agents are considered as a single entity with flows not taxed between them.
Transaction taxes are considered regressive. That is, they disproportionately affect the poor.
The idea is that everyone must spend a certain amount of money to live. For the poor, that amount is a greater proportion of their total income and wealth.
Basically, a wealthy person can choose to pay the same taxes as a poor person by only spending as much as a poor person.
Maybe that's fair. Maybe it's not. But it is a criticism of sales/transaction taxes.
That's true, the only thing I can think of is an "amplification curve" being set on whatever is paid, and that can be paid by everyone after any given period based on all the flows a person was involved in during that time.
So if a frugal rich person can be paying a similar amount to a poor person in overall tax looking at living expenses alone, one can also look at all the extra income the rich person gets from assets.
So this inequality/imbalance can be lessened through an amplification factor: by looking at the overall position of a person's flows.
The governments can decide how much to "squash down" down the inequality in society.
Would this address the issue raised?
The other thing interesting about a transaction tax is that individuals don't necessarily even need to be identified - only flows. That would suit the privacy-side of crypto. But I'm not sure how the final setup would look. And that could appeal to the super-rich who want to remain anonymous.
Maybe what I'm getting at is a blockchain tax: a proportion of transaction fees gets automatically routed to government coffers. Alternatively, add a staking tax as well.
This will all make more sense when more real-world assets go on-chain.
Completely ignores the true distinction between wealth and income taxes.
Person A has one billion dollars. Holds it in cash in a vault deep in a mountain he owns. He does not earn any wages.[1]
20% income tax: $0.00
01% wealth tax: $10,000,000.00
[1] Every billionaire controls their taxable income. Unlike wage earners, billionaires have 100% control over how much taxable income they have each year. They make choices.
They can have the vault in the cave. Or they can put money into artwork that grows in value and only generates income upon sale. Or a million other ways they can choose to control taxable income.
Except they already paid taxes on that one billion in cash. The receipt of that cash is taxable income.
Every citizen should bear the same burden of paying for the cost of running a modern society. The taxes Musk pays should cause him to experience the same impact to his financial life as experienced when a worker earning $75,000 a year pays his taxes.
It's a fairness and moral issue. If we changed from income taxes to wealth taxes, everyone will have the same issue. The billionaire will experience paying taxes on money that was previously taxed as income; as will the $75,000 worker who saved every dime he could spare to create life savings.
What isn't ethical or moral is for the wealthy to create the rules of who bears the burden of paying for the cost of running society; only to later complain when those who got the short end of that stick want to create a fair system.
Moreover, the vast majority of wealth held by billionaires has never been taxed.
Except that billionaires don't hold cash but assets. And they did not necessarily pay taxes on the value of those assets. The idea that billionaires have vaults of cash in mountains is not a sensible basis for any argument.
Are there serious proposals to just add a wealth tax on top of the existing income tax that would apply to the sort of people who actually pay much in income tax vs capital gains? It's an honest question; I haven't seen proposals of that sort, so I'm skeptical that the arguments are meaningful here. For an individual like Jeff Bezos, he's paying virtually no tax under the normal income tax rates referenced in the article, but rather capital gains tax, which tops out at 20%, not 37%.
None that I've seen, though I'm sure somebody somewhere has introduced something.
All that I've seen are wealth taxes on top of some arbitrary (but very large) wealth level. The latest proposal from Congress applied a 2% tax to wealth above $50 million with an additional 1% (3% total) on wealth over $1 billion. Plus a 40% exit tax to stop them all from fleeing to the Bahamas or Monaco.
The conversion would be more accurate if it compared wealth and capital gains taxes, no?
A defining feature of wealth taxes is that they only tax those that make most of their income through capital gains. This is why they're popular among much of the population.
Now the question is, if we lowered capgains tax rate by 20% but instituted a 1% wealth tax, would that be better or worse? My guess would be worse because wealth taxes are nearly unenforcable, but I wonder if there are good arguments for the other position.
What makes them unenforceable?
So you guys can figure this out but you can't figure out that a wealth tax today is just a destruction of future income tax? You trade the government wasting the money tomorrow for the government wasting the money today and if you think the investment growth will be higher than the government discount rate (which is pretty much gauranteed), then you are paying a potentially large premium to waste it today.
Lots of confusion and misunderstanding in these comments. Not surprising, given the highly charged nature of the subject. I highly recommend Ray Madoff's book The Second Estate [1] to learn more about the topic.
[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo256019...
Mind sharing what commenters are getting wrong?
I believe some of Ray Madoff's points are that the tax code and most tax intuitions kinda differ.
There's the idea that "wealth" gains tend to not be taxed for a variety of reasons. The common parlance of "Buy, Borrow, Die" category things. The "step-up in basis" category things - i.e. no capital gains tax realized on lots of inherited wealth. (The inheritance tax might trigger in some cases, but oddly the capital gains tax often might not be triggered on transferred assets because they were never sold and the new possessor will be taxed at the stepped up received value if they ever sell. So there's a chunk of appreciation that never received capital gains taxation.) Trust related things.
There's the idea that 501(c)(4)s allow wealth to be transferred untaxed while retaining control over the assets (particularly because those organizations can engage in political activity, but I'd guess generally some of the organizations exert lots of influence/prestige.)
So perhaps OP is suggesting that maybe there's some fungibility in income tax % and wealth tax %, but when you look at the tax code the equivalency looks pretty weak currently.
>It's clear that politicians don't get this from the way they talk about a "mere 1%" wealth tax. None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing.
His core point seems to be that taking $20 from him is mathematically equivalent to taking $20 from a homeless girl's hat.
I guess mathematically it is the same number if you dont normalize for that, which he wont.
> You can tell from the way they talk about the subject that they don't understand the momentousness of what they're proposing.
I think that what you can tell is that they think the voting public won't understand the momentousness of what they're proposing (or that their "color" will cheer that very momentousness).
Whether they themselves do or don't understand how impactful the proposal would be is much harder to guess.
It's not excessive to charge a 1% wealth tax when the people paying it don't pay any income tax thanks to their financial engineering.
I'll have some of whatever PG is smoking here!
This might be one point of view, but if you imagine an economy where everyone is poor/living paycheck-to-paycheck, then this looks super wrong:
Everyone has $100, earns $100/month, and spends $100/month.
at 1% wealth tax, they pay $1/year.
at 20% income tax, they pay $240/year.
Those are obviously not interchangeable taxes from a government revenue perspective!
Whenever I've seen anyone suggesting a wealth tax, it is specifically to address the very wealthy who pay an effective 0% tax rate, because they use the "buy, borrow, die" strategy. These are not wage earners, working a regular job, these are folks who own enough assets that they can borrow their way through life, living lavishly, never contributing meaningfully to the common good, the roads they are chauffeured over, the infrastructure and laws they benefit mightily from, the police who protect their assets, etc.
Since a lot of billionaires pay practically nothing in taxes, relative to their wealth, a wealth tax that equates to a 20% income tax would be entirely reasonable, and they'd still pay a much smaller percentage than the taxes I pay from my wages. It closes a loophole, it doesn't punish the very rich. And, nobody is suggesting the average 401k or Robinhood portfolio should be subject to a wealth tax.
I think a lot of ink has been spilled on the problems with the proposed California Wealth tax, the main points being:
1- Is this in fact a 1-time tax or is that a dishonest narrative to make the proposal easier to swallow?
2- How do you prevent capital flight to other states?
3- How do those with paper money or more voting shares than equity shares cover their tax bill?
That being said, I think more creative energy needs to be spent on the problem itself.
What do we do about individuals with $100M+ of unrealized capital gains that through various methods will never have to realize those gains to live an extraordinary lavish lifestyle, and their children will inherit the money with a step-up in basis? For those who make all their money from W2s, they pay very high tax burdens, while those who strictly have capital gains generally pay at most around ~20% for LTCG.
To those criticizing the California Wealth Tax, how do we solve this? How do we make billionaires pay more and lawyers/doctors/software engineers pay less?
Yeah... Most people just don't have the income to meaningfully invest.
And this seems to be an intentional category error.
The idea is to redistribute from the ultra wealthy to everyone else. Why would you then pretend that these methods should be convertable?
Just keep the conversation simple:
- Everyone with more than 10m in assets pays wealth tax on the value above 10m.
I appreciate PG's writing as always.
I'm skeptical that the super-rich are only generating 5% on their money. My anecdotal experience is that it's usually north of 15%. They have access to investments that main-street does not.
If we plug in 15% instead of 5% in PG's reasoning, the effective income tax increase is quite a bit lower.
There is a footnote discussing this point; he uses 5% as the risk-free rate.
Is 5% risk free even available to the little guys?
No.
Without free market and fair level of competition, no matter how much or how you tax, the richest portion will always end up paying little. Because there are hundreds of ways to make the tax law favor these people, and every time you change, it is the working class who pays them.
There's a way to levy a wealth tax that requires no asset liquidation whatsoever. Allow paying taxes with assets. The assets go into a sovereign wealth fund. At scale the fund effectively holds a percentage of the entire economy. Its returns should only be used to reduce income tax.
The sovereign wealth fund would be a stakeholder in equities and estates. It would have to exercise voting privileges and be a party to lawsuits. Do you want Trump getting control of the board of eg SpaceX or Meta?
> It would have to exercise voting privileges
There's never a requirement to vote your shares. I've never cast a single shareholder vote in my life. The fund could be legally required to not exercise any votes.
> be a party to lawsuits
Since when are shareholders a party to lawsuits? It's called limited liability for a reason.
> Do you want Trump getting control of the board
I'd normally say "legally structure it so that doesn't happen" and "follow best practices".But laws only mean anything if someone enforces them. If the government doesn't function correctly no government function can work correctly.
> None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing.
I sure would, if I was talking about someone who makes more money in a week than most of us will make in our entire lives.
I think pg has forgotten that most people aren't rich.
You need to understand the "Buy/Build, Borrow, Die" cycle that the ultra rich use to avoid basically any taxes.
Explained here: https://gemini.google.com/share/e230bcecaaeb
That's a distraction. Were that the issue politicians and the media were actually concerned about they could implement policy which made it ineffective at avoiding taxes-- e.g. requiring appreciated assets used as collateral to throw off an implied return which you're taxed on and which gets added to the asset's cost basis. We already have analogous tax rules e.g. using options trades to nullify the risk on an asset causes it to be treated as sold for tax purposes.
The reality is that the total financial effect of that sort of technique is not that considerable, but the political noise that can be made out of turning it into a perpetual problem (e.g. by only proposing to fix it with drastic non-solutions like wealth taxes) is gold to the people that profit from making us hate each other.
This treats all income like Labor income and completely ignores Investment income and long-term capital gains and losses.
How I pay tax on my labor income doesn't have a lot to do with how Paul pays taxes on his investments. Paul makes his money from investment income.
So 5% wealth tax would be the same as 100% income tax, 6% would de 120% AND 100% wealth tax would be the same as 2000% income tax.
I think some relevant factors are missing. What is the polite way of putting it... Ah right! You are a clown!
A 6% wealth tax indeed taxes more than the expected rate of return on the base assets. That is indeed equivalent to a higher rate than 100% in terms of an income tax. This math is in favor of PG’s argument.
Certainly, but it's about as useful as comparing the range of a radio with that of a car.
We might also compare tax revenue. For the US 1% wealth tax (for the 0.1%) would generate 250ish billion while 1% income tax would also generate 250 b. Then say 50% worth of increased tax evasion. 2% wealth tax is equal to 1% income tax.
you know that one guy, Ross Scott, who thought he wasn't going to get anywhere with stop killing games, but he thought, why not, let me ask people on YouTube whether or not people want to get together to stop video game publishers from killing service-based games
i think about that mentality all the time
one person just said, I don't think I'm going to be able to change the world, but well, why don't I try anyway because I don't see anyone else doing it, and instead thinking that a politician is responsible for my future instead of me and you
such a great mentality, I really do think about it all the time
> That's why I think few politicians currently understand how to convert between wealth and income taxes. You can tell from the way they talk about the subject that they don't understand the momentousness of what they're proposing. But I'm optimistic that we can teach them. The answer's not hard to understand, once you realize the question exists.
What a pompous and uninformed "I am smarter than others" way to think. And very 'parental' (ie 'we can teach them').
Note that Politicians (in order to remain in their job) need to think in terms of the people they represent and getting re-elected by those people. You may not like it it may not be good for you but understand that in the position they are in why they do it.
Isn't this argument simply confusing income tax with capital gains tax? Because that's the tax you pay on your investment returns, and it's actually capped (in the US) at around 20%.
No, he's disingenuously talking specifically about income tax, on interests.
Capital gains are on realized gains. Based on the difference between purchase price and selling price.
The thing is, wealthy people don't have interests bearing investments, because they don't need the cash right now. They either have unrealized gains (shares, real estate, etc), or interest bearing products wrapped in marked to market vehicules with reinvestment (ETFs, life insurance, mutual fund, etc).
Unrealized gains are not taxed as long as you don't sell them. If you need cash, you can borrow against them, so problem solved.
As for interest bearing investments, most companies nowadays use buybacks instead of dividends to avoid withholding taxes.
Just going to put this here to open up discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
Which is a tax on only one kind of wealth. Back when that was the kind that mattered most, that made sense. Today? Not so much.
Still, seems like table stakes.
Start with georgist/pigouvian taxes, and then expand to other kinds of income/wealth afterwards.
But Georgist taxes can go really far I'd imagine.
No, why? If we're going to do a wealth tax, then do a wealth tax. Why single out only one kind of wealth, and the kind that is not even the most important these days?
(What's more important? IP. The value of Google, say, isn't in the land it owns. It's in the code, the database of web pages, and the google.com domain name.)
> Why single out only one kind of wealth
Because of some very good reasons. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smi_iIoKybg
> kind that is not even the most important these days
uhhh source on that? I'm pretty sure land is literally the largest asset class in the economy. Real estate is by many estimates over 2X as large as the entire combined global market cap of all publicly traded companies. https://europhoenix.com/blog/part-ii-on-asset-classes-size-o...
No, I'm not going to watch a video to see what your point is. Either tell me, or don't.
Re your last paragraph: I admit I'm surprised by that. Still... Georgism calls for a tax only on the value of the land, not on the improvements. Of all that money in real estate, how much is in the improvements, and how much is in the raw land?
> This figure includes only high quality retail property, offices, industrial, hotels, residential, other commercial uses, and agricultural land
From this I gather that a large chunk of it is the improvements.
And, if real estate is the biggest category, why focus just on the land part of that, and ignore all the improvements on it?
This article is about a wealth tax. The arguments for Georgism are about something else - about social policy. It may even work as social policy, though I have at least some doubts. But as a wealth tax, it's not very effective. (If I were a rich person, I could buy a $100 million apartment in New York, and have the rest of my assets in stocks and gold and art, and my tax liability would be for my pro-rated fraction of the land that the high rise that held my apartment occupied. As a wealth tax, that's got far too many loopholes to be useful.)
it's more than that, because it's the one kind of wealth that has an (almost) completely inelastic supply
Same is true of gold. So why single out land?
the same is not true of gold.
I think the post is correct in a one-period sense, though I’m not sure the equivalence survives once you model long-term compounding, additional capital gains taxation and liquidity constraints.
Always a pleasure to hear capital explain to labor why taxing capital is bad, but this seems like a giant red herring. I don't want a wealth tax so I can cut my income tax, I want a wealth tax to address inequality. Our existing policies have produced a very bad bad outcome - wealth inequality exceeding that of pre-Industrial England led by a small, essentially randomly-selected group of people so wealthy that they effectively run everything who have entirely captured a corrupt government and are very close to making the situation permanent - and a wealth tax is the only policy idea I know of with any chance of changing that.
But income from most comes from labor, whereas wealth is passive.
I don't want to do math, but they aren't the same.
And people aren't investing 100% of their income in risk free 5% assets.
This grossly simplifies things.
In the US the max federal tax rate is 20% on capital gains, that is the gains realized when you typically sell an asset. The max tax rate on ordinary income is 37%. Some states don't tax at capital gains at all. Others make also tax capital gains.
There are a myriad of loopholes to defer and minimise capital gains ranging from QSBS (first 10mil in small businesses) to trusts to foundations to offset losses. Billionaires are incentivised to hold their assets and let them accrue rather than deploying that capital.
Yes, you could argue that billionaires have earned his billions. But could you really argue that the tax system should be configured to reward them for sitting on those billions and those gains should be taxed at a rate lower than someone working every day to earn 200k in wage income?
The economy has a fundamental division between those who earn income off the gains on assets, and those who earn an income on wages. Wealth taxes help level the playing field by those who already have a tax system in their favor.
Trickel down economics does not work when you earn more holding on to what you have.
Do people pay income tax on capital gains in the US? Why summing this fantasy rate with income tax otherwise?
Paul doesn't mention that these aren't exclusive. The California "Billionaires Tax" (which will likely soon become a "Millionaires Tax" after all the Billionaires exit the state), is levied on top of the regular state income tax.
Why choose the median state tax? The proposed wealth tax is in California, where the top tax rate is 13%. Also relevant would be Medicare (1.45% or 2.35% depending on your employment income) and presumably for billionaires, the Net Investment Income Tax, another 3.8%.
I understand why he simplifies things, but it doesn’t really jive with saying politicians don’t understand how taxes work.
I think politicians have a better understanding of taxes than Paul does, and they have a better understanding of how politics work - basically as in all things political, if you convince the majority that you’re dumping on minorities (billionaires, immigrants, trans people) you’ll do well.
> where the top tax rate is 13%
13.3%
> and presumably for billionaires, the Net Investment Income Tax,
NIIT kicks in at 200k, you presumably know this but I thought your comment could be misread as implying it only mattered for billionaires. :P
> I think politicians have a better understanding of taxes than Paul does, and they have a better understanding of how politics work - basically as in all things political, if you convince the majority that you’re dumping on minorities (billionaires, immigrants, trans people) you’ll do well
The author presumably understands this, but it's often more effective to pretend that your opposition is confused then to admit that you believe they are corrupt, unethical, dishonest, and actively trying to perpetrate evil. If nothing else, it gives them a more face saving avenue to course correct. And sometimes they really just didn't know better...
Man, as a young programmer coming up I really looked up to Paul Graham, but now as a seasoned vet in the industry, it's remarkable (and disappointing) to see him publish an article based on such a false equivalency. I mean this level of missing the forest-for-the-trees is the type of thing that routinely prevents senior engineers from getting promoted to staff because they're pedantically fixated on the wrong details. And that's on top of failing to read the room as to why people are even calling for a wealth tax in the first place.
The more obvious reason to not tax wealth is because it's hard to measure, and if you try to do it you will incentivize hiding it. Meanwhile, there are obvious obvious loopholes that the ultra-wealthy enjoy which could be reasonably closed. Namely, close the buy-borrow-die loophole, don't allow step-up basis for inherited wealth, and tax capital gains at least as much as income. Now people with a lot of money can afford to fund a lot of premium think tanks to come up with fancy economic reasoning why those ideas are Really Bad™, but at this point it's clear that's bullshit propaganda and the unintended consequences are exceedingly unlikely to be worse than the current unchecked consolidation of wealth and power enabled by the current loopholes.
I have a weird take on income tax.
In my opinion it's not a tax on the employee but on the employer and one of very few solid methods of actually taxing the rich (for as long as the rich need labor to get richer).
Your income tax money never reaches your pocket so it's never a part of your actual income and if employer didn't pay your income tax, they are (not you) on the hook for that.
And if income tax rate was lowered to zero, the employer wouldn't automatically start paying you that much more. There would be a renegotiation and most of that money would stay with the employer, because you already agreed and demonstrate that you can work for as little as you do. Of course in specific cases that the position of the employee in the market is very strong, some companies might choose to use the money they don't have to pay as your income tax to compete for employers by offering higher salaries. But that's definitely not given. Company getting richer rarely automatically translates to higher salaries.
So employee, if the economy is strong, should advocate for as high income taxes as possible, because that one of the very few ways that the money in the economy flows from the rich to the poor (with a detour through governments, which are poor nowadays anyway, perpetually indebted to the rich).
You are always so progressive up to the point you meet a progressive tax
Wealth and Income taxes are both wrong. What we need is to tax Land and Rents. By taxing land via a Land Value Tax system, and rent seeking monopolistic behavior, this will allow productive labor and productive capital to be exercised for economic growth.
Could you explain more or link a place that explains how this prevents the runaway wealth we are seeing?
The book Progress and Poverty argues this. Basically as we see wealth increase, increases in population and productivity raise the value of land (economic rent). Landowners capture this value, while wages for labor stagnate. A Land Value Tax and other taxes on rents removes that extraction, so people are able to reap its benefits. Meanwhile it also stop taxing productive things, like capital and labor, incentivizing people to work harder and invest. Runaway wealth is often parked in land other rents, but as land is taxed it, in incentivized investment: more housing, more innovation, etc to be more utilized more efficienty.
Bingo!
Yes! A tax system that incentivizes productivity! You for president! I would vote for this so f*** hard!
yawn hack writer issues wealth-hoarding and inequality apologia.
Economics is simple. Resources are finite, and money plus markets preserve that finitude as an invariant (that's why it works as a store of value). If you sit on more money and accumulate more money a natural consequence is that someone else has less access to the finite resources available (either in actuality or in potentia), period, because you can accumulate enough to begin to dictate how much they can access (by having decision power around wages). There is no reason to assume private individual wealth-hoarders have public interest in mind, and indeed they have often proven that they don't. They want to maximize value at specific points in the system, which is the literal definition of instability and eventual collapse in chaos theory. You need to bring the system back to stability through structural intervention and regulation. Tax the rich. Cap individual accumulation. It's that simple. The world does need or benefit from kings, whether minted through politic or finance.
Investments aren’t money. They’re just things you own, and their value can go up and down. They don’t affect the money supply.
Many investments are considered a liquid asset precisely because they are basically money.
You're missing the point on a stupid technicality.
If I have more liquid and therefore more purchasing and capital power than you, I have access to more resources than you, and I am immediately in a position in which I can potentially exploit you (get you to labor to generate more resources in exchange for some of the capital I have, then retain most of all of the newly generated capital and production from your labor for myself while paying you a fraction of what's generated because you are in a position of immediate need (need access to necessities) and I wasn't).
You obviously can’t convert between the two directly and suggesting that is disingenuous.
Income tax doesn’t affect unrealized capital gains (where the rich “hide” most of their income).
A wealth tax (even without a minimum threshold) doesn’t apply to the poorest who can’t accumulate enough to even have any savings.
This conversion only works for income that is entirely saved and reinvested, which the majority of people can’t afford to do.
In any case, pretty much everywhere in the developed world, we desperately need lower burden on people's labour (through salary income tax and related contributions). If wealth tax is a way to get there, so be it.
I think Paul thinks people care about the distinction, or think that a 20% marginal increase to the nation's wealthiest is something the public would find "unfair".
Rich people need to stop hanging out with other rich people.
Paul the billionaire ignoring that billionaires often don't pay any income tax at all. Come on man, we're not stupid just because we don't own superyachts.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
> So in the median case, a state adding an additional 20% in income tax would have a total marginal tax rate of 37% + 4.75% + 20%, or 61.75%
Good! It should still be higher!
There's nothing more tone deaf than an uber wealthy man arguing he shouldn't pay more in taxes to the system that allows him to be uber wealthy and to be deliberately misleading at the same time.
The argument is plausible - that you can treat wealth taxes as equivalent to income taxes if you treat wealth taxes as a tax on the ostensible income generation of the wealth.
Of course there's more complexity than this, but that aspect is a plausible reductive lens.
But the conclusion is silly. We all know the extremely wealthy who'd be subject to a wealth tax basically don't pay taxes and that a 20% tax is totally right around what the typical overall tax burden is for the middle class or median households. The 1% example equating to 20% is basically saying the wealth tax would be in line with a flat tax, not even with a progressive rate tax. The wealthy have turned the tax system into one that's functionally regressive for the most wealthy and then PG complains that a proposal that makes it more like a flat tax is "not understood" by lawmakers?
It sounds ridiculous to me.
Or maybe I'm missing something.
This argument strikes me as massively disingenuous. The central problem of the US tax system is caused by a combination of:
- high net wealth individuals essentially being indifferent to income tax.
- income tax and short term capital gains are taxed at much higher rates to long term capital gains.
- lower net wealth folks (ie. the general public) receiving most of their income as income.
- high and ultra high net wealth individuals now making most of their money through dynastic trusts and inheritance.
This combination ends up making it so that, as Warren Buffet would put it, he ends up paying a lower effective tax rate than his secretary.
I effectively don't really care if it's a wealth tax or some other more targeted technical fix, but it's not sustainable to have the very wealthiest individuals taxed at a lower effective tax rate than everyone else and also able to pass on their wealth directly to heirs without significant estate taxes.
LTCG + Corp tax rate >= income tax rate. It's an error to disregard the taxes your investments pay before they pass that wealth back to you.
should this article be renamed "How to count your chickens before the eggs even hatch?"
> In the median case, US state politicians talking about adding a "mere 1%" wealth tax are talking about causing the residents of their state to have the highest taxes in the world. That's not the sort of decision you make lightly.
The missed point is that a 1% wealth tax 'only for a select group' can easily become later a 1% (or higher) wealth tax 'for a less select group'.
Because billionaires accumulate wealth through assets and unrealized gains, many of them skip taking a traditional income and pay. If the numbers in the links below are to be believed, according to paulgraham's calculations, this might bump them into a ~fair range (when comparing to average/median earners).
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34170 https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-calculated-the-tru...
taxation is theft
Is this Graham accidentally revealing his contempt for working people?
He's a billionaire.
Based on available data deep contempt for working people should be assumed until proven otherwise, even for billionaires who are 'self-made' by way of a lot of right-time-right-place luck.
Hahaha this is so bogus.
Americans really struggle to understand how tax work outside of their country.
First, the whole premise of income to wealth tax equivalence is non sensical, because interests are rarely literally in the form of coupons/payments, but rather left as compounding value. This is the whole point of share buybacks, reinvested ETFs, etc; and Paul Graham knows that of course. If you are rich, you don't need the cash of your investments, so you don't want to trigger taxable events, so you are effectively at 0% tax rate and just let it compound.
> Currently the country with the highest marginal income tax rate is Denmark, at 60.5%
This is the most BS statement ever, and would only be believable to Americans with no understanding of how foreign country do taxes. Which is at best very naive of him, or highly disingenuous. This is because "tax" in the US is essentially employee paid, whereas most other countries split the bill between employer and employee at a higher proportion. The result is the same, but the employee part only is labeled "tax", the employer part being often called "contribution".
When comparing across countries, you have to look at the tax wedge (super gross to net), not the tax rate (gross to net).
And if you do that, well the US has a lower tax wedge than even the most generous European countries (Ireland).
In France for instance, the tax wedge is close to 70% for the higher bracket. Yes, that means if your employer pays $100, you get $30. And that's in a country with 20% VAT compared to US ~8%.
Not to mention, except super rich little little business-hub countries (Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Malta, Cayman Islands, etc), pretty much all _developed_ countries have some form of wealth tax, it's just common sense.
There are numbers in this post, but only in the technical sense.
My read of this is "the discussion of taxing wealth makes me anxious. i will do a tap dance, please become mired in watching / discussing my tap dance so that we can put off the inevitable and ultimately necessary a little longer"
To the "conversion rate": maybe, but who cares? The answer here is: apply the tax, see if we still have billionaires afterwards. If we do, then keep doing it.
We get it Paul. You’re rich and don’t want to give any of it away. We don’t expect you to. We know you and your ilk have bought all the politicians off and all this wealth tax nonsense is just theater. No need feigning their ignorance.
Yeah this ignores at least three things:
1. Most people do not derive even a fraction of their income from interest on wealth.
2. Earning income from interest on wealth requires zero effort. That isn't true for salaries.
3. Income and wealth are totally different things. You can find a way to equate them in one contrived example but there are so many other factors involved in the real world.
Billionaires gonna billionaire.
The point of a tax is to steer society, not to compute some sort of equivalence. Billionaire wealth has increased by way more than the 5 % mentioned over the last couple of years. This oxfam article [1] says 81 percent in 6 years. Wealth for the middle class means safety and stability. Wealth for the richest of the rich means power, and that threatens any democracy. The goal should be to prevent extreme inequality. It's supposed to be one person=one vote, not one dollar=one vote.
The example mentioning $100 is just tasteless. Wealth taxes are relevant only to people for which $100 means absolutely nothing whatsoever.
The article carefully avoids clear words. What's your conclusion here, dear Paul? Why are you intentionally staying vague? Nobody asked how to convert between wealth and income tax. So exactly why are you educating the public about this topic?
[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-wealth-j...
The thing that all these asshole billionaires don't want anyone to think about is that not taxing wealth means that a person who primarily accumulates non-income capital only ever pays taxes on what they spend while the rest of us pay taxes on approximately everything we get regardless of whether we spend it.
This seems to be willfully eliding that proposed wealth taxes tend to either be taxes on wealth above a certain amount, or (such as California’s) a one-time tax on people with wealth over a certain amount. If I were a mere millionaire -- technically, I am, with a net worth of just over $1.1M, but this would be true if that were $5M or $10M or even $50M -- then under any proposal I’ve seen, my wealth tax would be $0. (Note that if someone were to have $50M, then under Graham’s risk-free rate of return of 5%, they would literally have to do nothing to pay themselves an “income” of $2.5M annually.)
If I were an actual billionaire -- say, my net worth was $2B -- then my one-time tax under California’s proposal would be $100M, leaving me with a net worth of $1.9B. Under that 5% risk-free rate of return, I would recover that amount of money within one year even if my income were $0, which seems exceedingly unlikely.
One can argue about the specifics of various proposals -- the Tax Foundation, for example, thinks California’s proposal has “aggressive design choices and possible drafting errors” that could lead to somewhat bonkers results, although I haven’t seen any critiques of their analysis yet -- but a wealth tax cannot be converted to income tax in a reasonable manner any more than a VAT could be converted to property tax. They’re both taxes, but they’re simply not the same kind of tax. And while I don’t mean to cap on Paul here, there’s a distinct “woe, pity the poor billionaires who will surely be driven to bankruptcy” subtext I find to be risible nonsense.
The traditional name for a surprise "one time wealth tax" is a capital levy. It's got a pretty terrible reputation all around because it's the closest thing to an official declaration that your country (or state as the case may be) is now a complete fiscal and financial basket case that can't manage to fund itself by sensible means.
No one believes or acts like this will be a one time event (on any side of the issue). The history of all new forms of taxation is that eventually it will come for you.
This is a transparently misleading framing.
The very wealthy are paying very low effective rates on their investment gains. Various billionaires have publicly described the truth of this. This is not 20% on top of 35%. They are paying a marginal rate of 35% of deliberately minimized taxable income and zero on deliberately maximized unrealized gains. Then 20% when realized, but as we all know by now there are ways to make sure it’s never realized.
I don’t know what the best approach is here, but I know this framing is nonsense.
Thank you. This is exactly the problem- pg is twisting the conversation by saying "look how painful taxes are for you, pleb!" When in reality, the taxation levels on the ultra-wealthy (whom this is targeted toward) are so much smaller not only on a %'age level, but on an impact level as well.
Here is a better algorithm to edify the masses: if someone is such a massive billionaire as to have the boldness to teach the public basic 5th-grade math, their wealth tax rate should be set at 10%. From that point on, the rate goes in proportion to their level of condescension.
That's so unambitious, I'd argue.
> In 1940, the federal tax rate on income over $200,000 started at 66 percent. By 1944, the top tax rate on all income over $200,000 — about $3.4 million in today’s dollars — had jumped to 94 percent.
https://inequality.org/article/tax-the-rich-we-did-that-once...
Yet... an entire industry (financial advisors) will happily charge you a 1% "wealth tax" to manage your money. And you don't see lengthy articles from luminary venture capitalists about that.
Feel free to just tell the masses to eat cake since bread is so expensive while you dine on your mega-yacht. Just like the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, you may or may not be able to outlive the eventual violent outburst from the rest of the 99%. Scott Galloway is right on that the anti-data center backlash is just a proxy for anger at wealth inequality.
The entry level rate for >$10M AUM is ~0.5%
That's a 10% tax! <gasp>
> It's clear that politicians don't get this from the way they talk about a "mere 1%" wealth tax. None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing.
Uh … sure I would? Why not? The top bracket was 70% in the 80s. So that 61% is still a fair bit short of what it was then. (And the 80s isn't the highest point, either.)
IDK if it would be a good idea or not, but I'd entertain the debate, certainly. To state that this is unarguable, though, well…
Stop thinking about taxes as a way to fund the government.
Money in the long run can buy anything, including political influence. There are no regulations that can effectively preclude this. (And empirically, America over the past 40 years has seen moneyed entities successfully re-align politics and economic policy with their interests -- this was entirely predictable). An unequal society therefore cannot be a democracy. If you believe in democracy, then you necessarily must believe in wealth redistribution. (In fact, I argue that any person who believes that the American Revolution was justified, for any non-trivial reason, will likely find that those the same non-trivial reason could be invoked to reallocate wealth away from today's wealthy.)
Counterarguments to this view (i.e. a different top-level value than democracy / meaningful sovereignty over the society in which one lives) might invoke utilitarianism: an unequal society potentially produces "better" outcomes if capitalism is allowed to run unrestrained.
But a problem this argument encounters is who gets to decide what "better" is? All systems are economic in the long term, including political ones. A good framework for understanding is that a society in the long term is not "one person one vote" but rather "one dollar one vote." Today's preferences are dollar-weighted. Those with money decide what is better. The economy serves the average dollar's interests. And the average dollar's interest are the wealth-weighted preferences of society's members.
We started with an income tax to fund the government. But today our most pressing issue is not funding the government, but not having an oligarchy. Wealth is the thing that most needs to be taxed in order to allow for any semblance of democracy. Analogies drawn to income, though interesting, are meaningless.
I used to be against wealth taxes but as inequality gets out of hand I've more and more felt like they are the right move.
Hell, I'll be the first in line to pay the damn tax so long as billionaires are right in line with me too.
Taking advice from Paul Graham on why you should not impose a wealth tax is like taking advice from the neighbours cat on why you should allow him to crap on your lawn.
His argument is incredibly disingenuous; the sort of people who will be affected by a wealth tax are the sort of people who find ways of avoiding paying income tax, or indeed any tax at all if possible.
It makes me very angry when these billionaires who build up enormous wealth, partaially by avoiding paying the taxes that fund the infrastructure that help them build their wealth, get upset at people who suggest that maybe they should pay something back to society.
Paul Graham should, maybe, stick to blogging about tech, because when he gets into politics he really shows his true colours... and it ain't pretty.
Utter nonsense. You can't convert between a wealth tax and an income tax in any manner as simple as this, unless the wealth tax and the income tax were implemented in a simplistic way unlike any actual proposal. Most obviously, there is no such thing as "the" income tax rate, because different people pay different rates; those rates depend most obviously on the amount of income but also on various kinds of accounting gimmicks that allow wealthy people to pay less. Similarly, no one is proposing a flat wealth tax that would tax 1% of everyone's wealth.
The "example" discussing paying income tax on your $5 of return on your capital is similar nonsense. You don't pay anything on that gain unless it's income, which it isn't unless it's realized. So (assuming the various parameters of a wealth tax meant this mythical $100 person would indeed pay a wealth tax), the comparison is between zero income tax and some nonzero amount of wealth tax.
> None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing.
Plenty of politicians (e.g., Bernie Sanders, AOC) have pointed out that the top income tax rate during the 1950s was over 90%, and have suggested raising rates back or near to that level, which would be well more than a 20% increase in the income tax rate.
Cool, now I just need: "How to convert between silicon valley bloviating and normal human dialog."
> None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing.
Income tax is progressive. So, not really.
> It's clear that politicians don't get this from the way they talk about a "mere 1%" wealth tax. None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing.
Classic PG dishonesty. It's not mathematically the same, because it affects different people. "What is the income tax equivalent" isnt a relevant question unless your either stupid or desingenuous.
The real problem is our politicians aren't representing our people. All these other issues of wasteful spending and money printing and inflation and whatnot are downstream of that main crux of problem. People don't hate wealthy perse but when laypeople aren't provided proper means of living, they will try anything as a solution, even throwing a wrench in the system. That's how we got Trump.
Oligarch argument. Tax anything over $999m in assets, stocks, wealth at 100%. No more billionaires.
This is misleading and not the point of the wealth tax.
If you’re lucky enough that you don’t need to work for your income, you should be taxed. A lot. How much? Enough to make sure you don’t become so rich that your children don’t need to work.
Being rich is not fair, it’s very rarely deserved, and it needs to be taxed unfairly.
Any tax on wealth i will forever and always disagree with. People don’t see its just a setup for the eventual tax your children will be paying as it becomes normalized and inflation makes 10 million the new 1 million.
paul g so out of touch
This is wrong. You can’t convert between the two because it’s possible to have a lot of wealth with very little (even zero) income. Billionaires can completely avoid income taxes by paying themselves a very low salary and instead borrowing money against their assets (usually stock), which is not taxed as income.
Source: The Second Estate by Ray Madoff (2025)
If you want to understand why someone would even propose taking from the rich and complain about inequality, this post titled "Inequality Talk Is About Grabbing " is illuminating: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/inequality-is-about-grabbin...
> If you want to understand why someone would even propose taking from the rich and complain about inequality,
Because they want to take back what was taken from them.
Why is that the case?
Trivially follows from the premise.
I can't speak for others, but this doesn't match my thinking at all.
I want to heavily tax the ultra rich because money is power, and vast inequality in power is undemocratic and just plain dangerous.
I don't really care if somebody buys ten massive yachts. It's annoying and seems wasteful but it's not worth too much of my attention.
But it's another matter if somebody buys politicians, laws, social change. The issue with someone like Elon Musk isn't that he owns a private jet, or even that he owns a rocket company, it's that he bought his way to taking an axe to major parts of our government by pouring unimaginable amounts of money into buying a presidential election.
It's not about grabbing stuff, it's about preventing people from accumulating too much power. The ultra-wealthy should be heavily taxed for the same reason the President shouldn't be given unlimited power to do whatever they want.
Easily solved, remove the power centers and then the billionaires will have no power to buy or influence with their money.
There's no such thing as "Power centers".
Money is that power.
You cannot have billionaires and them not be immensely, structurally powerful.
That's the entire point of capitalism, that resources, including labor, be directed by those with capital.
Believing you can have a single human being in control of a non-negligible percentage of all resources of a country, and they wont somehow be actually powerful or influential is moronic.
Taking the power away from billionaires literally IS taking their money.
“Money is that power.”
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Power is power. Members of the Communist Party in the USSR were as wealthy as their subjects, their power differential was enormous.
Not all power is money, but money is power.
I know, that's why I want to tax them, to remove their power.
Of course, you probably mean to remove their power centers without removing their money. But that doesn't make any sense. Money is power. You can't remove the power from a billionaire and leave them a billionaire.
Define "easily" for us, please.
Don't hand over power to politicians, bureaucrats and NGOs. It's not rocket science to need further explanation.
Politicians, by definition, have power. How do you easily remove or withhold it?
It's the degree of power they hold, not a binary. A politican in Switzerland has much less power than a politician in China.
When your power is to determine which day the recycling truck is dropping-by, hardly anyone wants to coerce that power. But when it is e.g printing money the calculus is massively different.
> When your power is to determine which day the recycling truck is dropping-by, hardly anyone wants to coerce that power.
I take it you've never encountered a homeowner's association.
I thought you said it was easy?
"Don't want to be ruled by billionaires, peasants? Have you tried dismantling your government so they can't buy it? That will surely save you."
Isn’t that what Anarchists and Marxists peddle to the peasants?
A Marxist peddles restructuring of the government to better represent the people. Notable attempts at that replaced existing governments with autocracies that promptly killed the Marxists and Anarchists among them, which is not what you were talking about, I don't think. What kind of revolutionary wants only to tear down their government and not replace it? Anarcho-primitivists, I guess?
That is not illuminating at all. Like, the author just imagines the premise and finds three ways to repeat it. There is no exploration into why people think inequality is unfair; the underlying assumption is that it is perfectly natural and trying to address it is hypocritical and harmful.
The other major assumption is that billionaires are rich because of something they did or are good at doing, better than anyone else could in their position. There is no challenge to this assumption in the text.
This belies a deep disconnect with reality, and an unwillingness to confront the idea that maybe excessive inequality is caused by too much concentrated power changing the rules to further concentrate power. Taxation is just one mechanism to combat this tendency; another way is the guillotine.
this is some of the most insipid dreck i've read in a long time. the only thing illuminated here is the author's complete lack of understanding regarding ability and worth and total inability to think beyond a system imposed upon him by others. i think the kids would say he's "billionaire glazing".
I think your blog post is confused. People on the left are pro-taxation because they (a) think billionaires do not have superpowers, and are benefiting from some combination of systemic injustices and plain old fraud gussied up for the modern era, and (b) think superheroes actually shouldn't be allowed to have 1,000,000 times the influence over the structure of the world and its economy compared to a mundane human, even if they existed.
There isn't a level of competence or ability that shifts the answer to the morality of power. There's not an earning threshold you can cross that entitles you to own a fiefdom or a level of genius that grants you moral right to dictate how others use your inventions. We create democracy and grant everyone an equal vote in matters that impact their lives. The economy gets layered on top to allocate resources efficiently. If the economy is deciding that some people live like kings and some like serfs, then we've failed to construct an economy that lives up to liberal values.
Wow, what a piece of text. Just, wow. Our poor billionaires and their tasty, tasty boots.
The vibe I get is that he's saying "you poors are just jealous of the billionaires who are smarter and richer than you, so you want to take it away from them"
The comparison to _literal super heroes_ from comic books definitely made me roll my eyes
My problem with billionaires is that their gains are in part from exploitation. I just don't believe that one person can actually produce billions of dollars of value all by themselves. They extract that value from other people and our whole system is structured to promote this.
There are probably millions people who could have been Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Elon Musk or whoever. A million people with the right skills who maybe were born a few years too late or didn't have the right connections or just didn't have rich enough parents. It's a little too "winner take all" for my taste. And then those few winners end up having disproportionate affect on politics and issues that affect us all. It's just not a great system.
> People usually become billionaires via having “super-powers,” i.e., very unusual abilities, at least within some context.
There are certainly sometimes unusual abilities in a positive sense, but the common case likely falls closer to having an unusual degree of sociopathy. It is unclear to me how else one could view the state of perfectly solvable human suffering in the world and continue to prioritize accumulating wealth over all else, moreover and overwhelmingly at the cost of being party to the suffering itself. Indeed, I suspect having such callous disregard for your fellow person is prerequisite to encountering these unfathomable sums.
When people with an intact capacity for empathy come into huge amounts of money I think it's far more common to give a large proportion of it away (say, Jane Street workers have a culture of doing this). And thus you only stay 'comfortably' wealthy, rather than accumulating so much that it distorts society around your singular existence.
> People usually become billionaires via having “super-powers,” i.e., very unusual abilities, at least within some context.
If you count luck, maybe.
> But what if most billionaires had super-powers of the traditional comic book sort, like x-ray vision or an ability to fly, etc.? That is, what if people with physical super-powers earned billions in the labor market by selling the use of these powers? Would folks be just as eager to tax them to reduce unfair inequality?
Yes, I would.
> But if those few very rich folks had real physical super-powers, we would be a lot more afraid of their simple physical retaliation. They might be very effective at physically resisting our attempts to take their stuff.
Yes, and this is why a lot of superhero movies involve fighting the greedy superpowered villain.
Right, as presented, these people are closer to Lex Luthor than Superman.
And I would still want to tax Superman.