Wealth Tax >>>MOD WARNING<<<

?? Does it look like it is covered by estate taxes??

 

The fact that a number of advanced industrialized countries actually use wealth taxes successfully proves your claims are objectively false.

Assets and liabilities, by the market.

There are professional appraisers whose job is to value such items. Many items that have low value and would be difficult to value, such as people's personal effects, need not be taxed and thus would not be valued.

 

Income taxes are easy to calculate. Assets are not easy to identify and/or value and constantly change. Real estate value for property taxes has nothing to do with the asset value of the property. You also have assets in safe deposit boxes, and stuff hidden in basements and attics, and stuff placed offshore, etc.

You are dreaming about an unrealistic tax system which solves no problems and actually creates problems...

 

Countries use a number of taxes, combining different types to maximise revenues whilst avoiding some of the distortions that can be created through over-avoidance on one tax. Those that think a single tax can be used are living in cloud cuckoo land, aren't they?

 

?? ROTFL!! With that claim, you forever disqualify yourself from participation in a rational discussion of taxation.

Actually, they are almost all very easy to identify and value, and they typically don't change much at all.

False. While there are certainly jurisdictions that don't maintain accurate valuations, most are either accurate enough, or wrong in a consistent way that makes it quite easy to get an accurate value. In any case, it would be a trivial matter to just require all private appraisers to submit copies of their appraisals to the local tax office, and then use those to value all the unappraised properties using a computer program.

Offshore assets obviously wouldn't be taxed, nor would offshore liabilities reduce the tax. As I said, personal effects such as you describe need not be taxed.

As there are countries that actually use wealth taxes, it is objectively the case that it is realistic. And you are of course objectively wrong that it solves no problems. It solves a number of problems, such as the regressivity of taxing earned income and the atrocious under-taxation of the super-duper uber-rich.

 

Taxing wealth instead of income is probably the most stupid idea I have read about yet. Without the ability to accumulate wealth significant amounts of investment would simply dry up. From the conversations I have read here and in other places suggests that taxing wealth is more about reducing wealth than collecting revenue. Once that occurs we are in a down hill race to losing prosperity as a country. It is not the wealthy who are holding back the less wealthy or the least wealthy, it is their own level of competency which determines where a person ends up on the scale of wealth. I believe in progressive taxation of income and totally object to any taxation on wealth whether that wealth is in a medium of exchange or in property of some kind.

 

Indeed! Vertical equity undoubtedly leads to the conclusion that wealth taxes can only play a marginal role

 

I agree with you 100%. Wealth taxes are as stupid as Land Value Taxes and Corporate taxation. They are not levied to raise revenues, they are used to equalize the status between the haves and the have nots. The problem is, once that equalization has occurred the revenue stream dries up then no one has enough income or wealth to be taxed.

Tax incidence studies tell us about the lack of value of Corporate taxes; but common sense tells us wealth taxes are stupid ideas put forth by stupid people.

Yes, and then only temporarily!

 

"Vertical equity" = everyone pays the same amount of tax...?

As we've seen from your consistent rationalization of the greed, privilege and parasitism of the rich (whom you despicably call, "OAPs") at the expense of working people, what you actually favor and support is the robbery, enslavement, starvation, torture and murder of working people for the unearned profit of rich, greedy, privileged parasites.

 

There's a role for them (but tax evasion/dodging will always mean the less wealthy are really harassed), but only those pushing an extremist agenda would suggest that they can dominate.

 

Nope. I can see why you just blunder about people being evil when you don't understand basic definitions.

Deliberate misrepresentation! I've stated the obvious: OAPs are more likely to own their houses out-right. You want OAPs to pay more tax. I certainly find that disagreeable as its quite inconsistent with any 'ability to pay' criteria

 

I guess that must be why Nobel laureates in economics such as Milton Friedman have often favored land value taxation....

No, they just mitigate the injustice done to the victims of privilege WHILE raising revenue. You know this.

Such claims are just false, absurd and dishonest. Does Switzerland look like its revenue streams have dried up, with no one having enough income or wealth to be taxed? Did the land value tax of Meiji Japan have any such effect? Or did it produce the world's first great economic miracle, with average double-digit annual growth in per capita GDP extended for a whole generation?

Your stupid, evil filth is astounding in its falsity, absurdity and dishonesty.

John Stuart Mill was one of the most intelligent people who ever lived. He explicitly advocated land value taxation. So did Einstein, Churchill, and many of the greatest economists. You, by contrast, are not one of the most intelligent people who ever lived, and are self-evidently an economic ignoramus.

Again, such claims have all been proved false, stupid, absurd, and dishonest by the actual facts of history.

 

Friedman who believed in a vertical Phillips Curve? Also someone that developed a negative income tax model (and certainly not someone who has pushed the stupidity of the 'single tax' agenda)

 

Then why do you claim that vertical equity requires the rich to pay no more tax than working people, or even less if they have less income?

I understand your basic definitions, which demonstrate the relationship between evil and dishonesty.

Fact.

Ungrammatical. More likely than who?

Anyway, you have on that illogical basis made the false and dishonest claim that OAPs who do own their houses outright have no more ability to pay taxes than those who are otherwise in the same situation but paying mortgages or renting.

That is just another bald fabrication on your part about what I have plainly written, as any reader can easily verify. I want the rich and privileged to pay more tax.

It is self-evidently you who will say, do, and believe ANYTHING WHATEVER to avoid any honest and accurate use of ability to pay criteria.

 

Stupid garbage with no basis in fact. Land taxation cannot be evaded or dodged, because land cannot be moved, and it cannot be hidden.

You claim that any call for justice and efficiency is an "extremist agenda."

 

Just fact! And please stop with the Georgist pretending. You've already referred to how OAPs will be forced to rent out rooms and possibly sell their homes.

You don't call for justice. You push a nonsense 'single tax' agenda that has been rejected since the early 20th century.

 

Why did you ask a nonsense question over vertical equity then? Make sense dear boy!

Non-OAPs obviously!

We've already seen that the housing literature refers to how home ownership is often inconsistent with higher well-being. And here we see you again demanding that OAPs either sell their abode or rent out rooms. Your hatred of the old is nasty!

No, you want to push a rejected Georgist agenda and, given the extremism that it necessarily involves, you have to go for emotionalism where you make foolish accusations over evilness

I will simply tut at the extremist following a long rejected agenda

 

Why do you do this to yourself? Do you think I enjoy demolishing and humiliating you for your ignorance and dishonesty?

"Since 1974 seven Nobel Prizes have been given for work critical of the Phillips curve... The authors receiving those prizes include Thomas Sargent, Christopher Sims, Edmund Phelps, Edward Prescott, Robert A. Mundell, Robert E. Lucas, Milton Friedman, and F.A. Hayek."

You are destroyed. Nothing you can say even matters any more.

It's one way to add a bit of progressivity.

You again show that you are completely reliant on the "single tax" strawman.

 

I find it amusing that, although you talk about justice, you champion a right winger like Friedman. Friedman benefited from the false 'neo-Keynesianism versus monetarism' debate. That debate started with the drivel of the Phillips Curve (which was merely an empirical historical relationship between prices and unemployment) and then came out with the garbage that it was vertical in the long run (with Friedman using bobbins about money illusion to try and pretend there was something hardcore behind the crap). Note also that Friedman had links with right wing authoritarians. That also included being the champion for Thatcherism, where child poverty went through the roof. By referring to Friedman, you only demonstrate just how out of touch your Georgist clap-trap really is.

A negative income tax is not progressive. It eliminates unemployment traps, but adopts a proportional tax (because of bogus analysis over work disincentive effects). Again you show your 'innocence'

That is all you go on about. It would cheer me to see you learn from your error and to reject the stupidity of Georgism

 

I find it predictable -- even inevitable -- that you claim I have "championed" Friedman when I have not. I simply note that he is a Nobel laureate in economics, therefore incomparably better informed on the subject than you, and he supported land value taxation.

As usual, you engage in multiple sneers, but offer no arguments.

It is indisputably progressive.

More claims without substance. The negative income tax is self-evidently not proportional, as the rate goes from negative to positive. You are making a fool of yourself, as usual.

While you again show your lack thereof.

That is a fabrication, as you know. If you could quote me, even once, advocating or even initiating discussion of a single tax, readers would have a reason not to dismiss your claim as a bald lie.

I neither call nor consider myself a Georgist, as you know. You just have to make $#!+ up about what I have plainly written because you have nothing to offer.

 

I agree, but am concerned with how expensive such a tax would be to administer and whether whatever gains you'd achieve would be lost trying to police and enforce it.

Only so long as it's the only taxes, which I honestly think is completely and utterly politically unfeasible.

Why tax an entity that's going to pass it along anyway? Nothing but a distortion, completely agree.

 

Read it again, Roy. What I stated was "A wealth tax would be absolutely impossible to perform in any fair or rational way." Certainly wealth, some of it, can be easily taxed successfully, but what I've tried to point out is that wealth can be acquired and amassed in many ways, some of which can be easily hidden.

Some assets, of course, but ALL?

Like my collection of rare postage stamps, coins, art, and other small but very valuable items I have secretly acquired over the years?

It's obvious that some wealth can/could be very easily taxed successfully, but vast amounts would remain hidden and untaxable.

Why is our animus not directed at our government, who by the actions taken by it and the Federal reserve combined over the last century have created the conditions which have produced such great wealth disparity over a growing population for its' own benefit and to the detriment of the population in general? Continuous borrowing and spending has not achieved greater equality, and has only achieved the illusion of a rich and prosperous nation, resulting in making the common citizen unable to provide for their economic security without government assistance.

Our government, as well as those of most other developed world countries, has created a precarious environment which will be very difficult to resolve by any desirable means. What used to serve as money, gold and silver, was a product of the people and varied little in its value over many centuries. Today, money is mined from a printing press, and the more that is produced the less value it has, causing prices and wages to rise at a rate the Fed tries to intentionally maintain as the means of micromanaging our economy, resulting in the appearance of a continually growing economy, GDP, and tax revenues, with our government spending and borrowing additionally to keep pace with the rising cost of supporting a growing population that far exceeds the population needed to produce their needs.

 

That you'd refer to Friedman, someone with such close links to right wing authoritarianism, illustrates that your emotionalism is shallow twaddle (and nothing more). I also find it interesting that you think we can use him as a source of knowledge. Does this mean you also support his vertical Phillips Curve analysis?

A ridiculous response. I provided detail over his right wing nature and how it led to conclusion alien to economic reality. Perhaps you've chosen the dogmatic because of the severity of your own dogma?

Again you show your innocence! A negative income tax, by integrating tax and benefit systems, avoids the unemployment trap (i.e. its motivation is to avoid corner solutions in the labour supply model, perceivably shifting the natural rate of unemployment so the right winger can draw a more pleasurable made-up vertical Phillips Curve). As part of that, a linear tax system is warranted (again to avoid work disincentive effects so we work our labour force as hard as possible). Its about avoiding progressivity!

Again with the innocence! The negative rate merely reflects the integration of tax and benefit systems. As already mentioned (and this is bleedin obvious as it originated from right wing authoritarianism), its motivated by subsequently avoiding progressivity. Thus, its motivated by removing progressive tax systems with a linear tax. To call that outcome progressive would be idiotic!

I'm happy for you to reject the single tax stupidity. Could you do that for me now?

Its not a good idea to call yourself a Georgist. They're irrelevant after all.

 

it is a wealth tax.

 

Nonsense.