[TheOtherHobbes]

The current default isn't going to end well either.

The obvious solution is a wealth tax instead of income taxes. Take back the money that's been privatised, end the pointless and inefficient boom and bust hamster wheel, and spend bigly on productive social investment - education, gamechanger R&D, small business development, aerospace, robotics, AI, renewables, and other physical infrastructure.

Why isn't this happening already?

[AnimalMuppet]

I think that a wealth (or capital) tax makes more sense than a land tax.

Why hasn't it happened yet? I can see two reasons. Pick which one you think is more believable.

Reason 1: The rich don't like the idea of a wealth tax, and the rich have a lot of political clout.

Reason 2: The consequences could be rather negative. If the US creates a wealth tax, you'd see an exodus of assets and rich people. It would become a less attractive location for businesses (including startups). Would that be a net win for the US?

[zzzzzzzza]

yea, nice, how do you assess wealth? (you can't) also your wealth tax creates.. deadweight loss, lvt actually benefits the economy.

Meanwhile land wealth correlates very well with real wealth. Jeff bezos, for instance is one of the biggest landowners in the United States. And we already have a system in place to assess property values - and there's no way to hide property.

[AnimalMuppet]

You think that land is easier to assess the value of than other forms of wealth? That seems backwards. What's 1000 shares of Amazon worth? I can get a lot more accurate and current answer to that than I can to what some land is worth. (Yeah, it gets harder with some things like works of art.)

Jeff Bezos may be one of the biggest landowners in the US, but the cause and effect is backwards. He became rich off of something that didn't need much land (Amazon), and then later bought land with the money. But suppose he hadn't. Suppose he had been willing to just sit on his billions in Amazon stock. Should he escape the tax because he didn't buy land?

There's no way to hide property? There's not much way to hide stock ownership, either. (I agree that you can hide ownership of gold, diamonds, works of art, and bitcoin. But, frankly, not many people are using those as their primary stores of wealth.)

A wealth tax creates deadweight loss, whereas a land value tax benefits the economy? You need an argument to demonstrate that rather than just asserting it, at least if you want to actually convince anybody. From where I sit, it looks to me like a land value tax is just another kind of wealth tax, and is no more or less a deadweight loss than any other kind of wealth tax.

In fact, a wealth tax on stock might make stocks' values correspond more with their dividend rates. That might re-value things like Uber (valued at $90 billion but losing money hand over fist), which one could argue is a good thing. I could see that working in much the same way as you think a land value tax will work for real estate.

[zzzzzzzza]

if you can't disambiguate a capital gains tax from a "wealth tax", or spend 5 seconds googling the deadweight loss of various taxes, I got nothin to say man, a hacker news comment is not the place to explain these kinds of things.

We already assess property value. If you tax wealth people will try to hide it in ways they do not now. Deadweight losses of various taxes are well established facts. Capital gains taxes are lower than other taxes for a reason: capital is more sensitive to tax rates.

It's telling you haven't replied to my other comment...

[AnimalMuppet]

I never even mentioned capital gains taxes. I don't know what I said that you interpreted as me not knowing the difference between capital gains and wealth taxes, but I do in fact know the difference. I was actually talking about a wealth tax, not a capital gains tax.

I didn't reply to your other comment because I put the substance of what I would say to that in this subthread.

Speaking of substance... you're not giving much. You're claiming that your position is correct, but you're not backing it up with anything solid. "Once you do the research you'll agree with me" is not an argument, it's an excuse. You want to claim you're right and have everyone else agree, but you don't seem to want to actually defend your position.

I'm done with this discussion, so I'll leave you the last word.