Instead of taxing asset growth, they should tax the loan trick. For example Elon Musk uses loans taken out with stock as collateral, with no intention to ever pay them back - the banks are happy to take the collateral when the shareholder dies or something, because they're happy enough to put the debt on their books.
1. Kill the insane Opportunity Zone tax dodge.
2. Kill GRATs. I personally know of at least one person who has been passed a gain of over a billion dollars through that nonsense. And that was a decade ago.
Oh, but wait, both of those things affect major donors...
Yeah, never mind, let’s just waste lots of time distracting the populace with something with a catchy name — “the Billionaire’s Tax” — that will keep lots of polarized discourse going while absolutely nothing gets accomplished.
The only way I'd support something like this is if they limited it to taxing investments when they are used. If a person holds onto an inflated asset they shouldn't be penalized. If they use that asset as collateral for a loan then I think it's fair game.
That said, I'd like to see an analysis of what the financial system would look like if we applied that sort of logic to all asset classes and included various entities like corporations, trusts, etc., before I'm fully sold on it.
I really appreciate the desire to reign in the massive wealth inequality in the world today. I'm just wary of these sorts of 'hackish' approaches. I think of the law like I think of source code. It should be clear, consistent, analyzable, and come with a clear set of testable goals and intentions.
There's no way a radical bill like this would ever get even close to being passed. Do legislatures in other nations waste this much time virtue signaling? Given her background, I have a hard time believing that Warren genuinely thinks that it's a good idea. I'm sure it will make her more popular though.
I'm curious, what are the tax loopholes they talk of for the companies? It seems they are using credits, etc built in by Congress to support policy, like EVs and stuff.
This sounds overly complicated. Why not just fix the capital gains tax structure to match better with the standard tax rate for higher earners? Keeping track of individual's wealth seems a little tricky, especially once people start hiding assets.
We need more tax revenue to fund our largess says bloated, inefficient government. More news at 11.
How about we implement a tax for any person or entity with more than 10 homes. More than 10 homes, each additional home has a 1% or more federal property tax against all homes. 15 homes = 5% property tax on all homes. For the big buyers like Zillow or BlackRock this would be business-destroying. Small investors and flippers would be unaffected.
You’d see home shortages end at light speed. And yes home prices may crash but it’s a long term fix. People would probably appreciate it long term much more than this plan.
Or maybe it phases in over a 5 year period. Something though.
So much spin on HN today, i hope you all read this before poo-pooing it.
" The tax proposal would apply to just about 700 taxpayers, Democrats say — people who earn more than $100 million per year or who have more than $1 billion in assets for three straight years. It would require them to give the IRS a detailed account of how much the assets they own gained or lost each year, a process called mark to market."
Why? The amount of money this week raise is small. And of course, many will take steps to not pay it, making the asking even smaller. So why? Is it to get the "wealth"tax started so they can grow who it affects? There are already a ton of comments here about how it didn't affect them or it is a good idea to steal wealth from the rich.
Problem is big companies dodge taxes and that needs a fix. Example -- you buy a smart phone you pay sales tax (consumer or normal people), what they should do is put something like 0.5% or some small Federal tax which companies have to pay on sale. Because most of the time companies park their profit offshore and pay nothing in tax.
Lets face with real tax on the rich is never going to happen in the US as they hold and pull all the lobbying strings.
Just raise interest rates and use eminent domain to build housing in locally zoned off areas.
Of course we can't do either of these things (gov debt and people with power have money -> own land -> love strict zoning)
Optics of it are bad given the CCP has been accelerating their crack down on billionaires, also known as state-independent power centers. This is the direction they want to take us I guess.
This will wipe put any wealth the middle class has. It's becoming very clear that the US has few years left.
Would such a law be legal? It seems like it would be a direct tax that is not an income tax.
The trend in any economic system over time is going to be for those with wealth to extract more from those without it. Ultimately, the end game is either going to be cyclical revolution / violence, or some sort of redistributive tax scheme.
There's no abstract plan that lets Bill Gates own all of the nation's farm land, and lets Blackrock clear-cut all of the forests of the Amazon jungle, and lets Michael Bloomberg mass-arrest protesters of his political party after buying his way into office, and/or lets Google cover the landscape with armed ai-drone protected company towns.
That said, the only reason DNC senators have proposed such a thing is that they have Manchin and Sinema to prevent it from actually being voted on by the 30 other DNC senators who would also oppose it for the sake of their donors.
I would also like to see term limits while we are at it.
inflation is the most effective billionaires tax we have. unfortunately it also hurts lower and middle classes. however, we can send direct monetary stimulus to lower and middle classes to offset the loss of monetary value.
there was also once a tax proposed a century ago...one that was to only be applied to the ultra-rich, and even then...sparingly
it was called the Federal Income Tax
you will be paying this new tax eventually too
Step 1 - print money, give it to banks
Step 2 - banks use it to buy stocks, commodities pushing prices up
Step 3 - tax the gains
Step 4 - you an awesome government that both prints money and taxes into oblivion. Obviously the country benefits. /sarcasm
I find it very hard to support that much spending when they haven't even figured out where they're going to get the money from.
Quit layering more laws on top of other laws. Review the current system because it's _obvious_ it's not working - and update the tax system. Too bad the government has so much corporate money baked into it's procedures that it'll never happen.
I glanced at the article and I'm not sure if I'm incorrect/misremembering, or if it's the classic NPR spin, but wasn't this part of the whole "taxing unrealized gains" plan as a way to pay for this?
I would support this if I didn’t already know it was going to be thrown away by the govt. I would wager the capital is more effectively deployed to benefit society where it currently is.
It will start as a wealth tax on billionaires but within five years it will be a wealth tax on anyone with a net worth greater than 100k. That’s how these things go. Take a look at the history of the history of the federal income tax for an example. It started in 1913 as a mere 1% on the lowest income earner. By 1918, the lowest bracket was 6%. Now it’s 10%.
You’ll have to do some adjusting for inflation, but this document lists every federal income tax bracket over the past 150 years:
https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/fed_individual_r...
I have mostly skeptical about tax plans like this one that tax non-liquid assets. It seems odd to me to tax a person’s illiquid holdings in a company for example. Do we force people to sell pieces of their property to pay the taxes on that property? (In short, for many types of property, yes, but it still has always seemed strange to me)
That said, the more I read about the low or no interest loans against investments that seem to be the primary “income” of the mega-rich, it seems more and more that something needs to be done here.
Or am I wrong? Thoughts?