You pay property tax because of the services that are provided to you by the municipality. Garbage collection, streets, parks, schools, libraries, public services, social programs, public events, etc.
While I understand the idea your going for here the intent of those taxes aren't the same and the businesses that they are interested in would pay some form of tax (probably?).
I think something like a gross wealth tax, 10% of all wealth a year over over something like the poverty line * 100 in total assets
The people that benefit the most from society should pay for it. Also, people living off the income from actual work are already paying a tax to the wealthy, that's where their wealth comes from.
Income tax is double taxation to both the wealthy/corporations, in their profits, and to the government.
Let me offer this as well - it’s not just about taxing wealth. By taxing that wealth you also reduce their influence. If everyone taxes them they can’t play their games of threatening to run away with their money to elsewhere.
I don't think wealth tax is necessarily appropriate. I think capital gains is where tax is needed most. That's where all the loopholes are.
However income tax is the biggest load of bullshit. You're already giving up your time to generate an income, in service of a business which itself is in service of society, so why should you have to give up even more? Income up to some relatively high amount should be tax free. We should be taxing people for using money to make more money without actually doing things themselves.
I don’t think wealth tax is necessarily appropriate. I think capital gains is where tax is needed most.
These two are not that different. But capital gains tax is only paid when the gain is realised (minus any loopholes), a wealth tax is based on the current value of the capital.
Yeah but the issue is you're constantly paying tax on something. If you have money in the bank, then that's going to devalue anyway through inflation, yet it will devalue even more with this. There would need to be a very high threshold for the tax to start to prevent it from being unfair. There's also the issue that the value of wealth can be somewhat subjective - how much would you tax someone for owning an expensive piece of art, how would you measure the value in between sales?
Wealth tax is arguably better than income tax, as encouraging spending is generally a good thing (you won't get taxed on wealth if you don't hang onto it) but the main focus of tax should be on capital gains when the value is actually realised. I think it would be far better to close all the loopholes and simplify the capital gains tax system than to introduce a new wealth tax. That, and addressing money being moved overseas, which is where a lot of wealth will end up hidden if wealth tax becomes the target.
Income tax, as far as I know, came as a replacement for basic “per-person federal tax”. It has the nice effect of not extracting money from anyone not making money, and also makes it harder to circumvent basic lump end-of-year taxation.
Taxing capital gains better wouldn't tax people not making money, either, however it has the advantage of not taxing people who are already giving up the most valuable thing in service: time.
Somehow, some way, we have got to forcibly take money from one group and give it to another. Because that will solve all problems, it's easy! Why can't everyone see that?
I don’t remember the numbers precisely, but something like 20 billionaires own $15 trillion of the world’s wealth, so yeah probably would help quite a bit.
If the billionaires want to keep playing, someone has to restock the claw machine.
The ethics of taking money away from billionaires aside, you statistically will never be a billionaire AND you stand to gain from closure of the wealth gap. Why the facetious attitude? Do you not want more money and a higher standard of living?