[patentatt]

I don't even want their 'charity,' I just want systems in place to prevent anyone from accumulating that amount of wealth in the first place. First, the basis of philanthropy is to have all the 'normals' grovel at the feet of the all-mighty wealthy begging for handouts. It stokes the wealthy persons ego and also gives them additional power. Second, there's no reason to believe that the wealthy philanthropist has any better idea of how to deploy their capital than the other institutions that would otherwise. Look at Gates, for example. He spent a decade or so and billions of dollars reshaping US public education and at the end of it basically admitted complete failure. That money should have never been his to direct in the first place. So no, we should want their greed exposed and not papered over by philanthropy so that the public eventually realizes that people accumulating and hoarding that much wealth is damaging to society and enact appropriate taxation schemes to claw back what they have stolen and prevent anyone else from ever doing it again.

[tomcam]

How much wealth should one be allowed to accumulate?

[wizardforhire]

We’ve already answered this question in the US as a society time and again.

Heres sort primer to for anyone that is not up to speed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_antit...

[tomcam]

Sorry I don’t see that answer in the linked article, which is about antitrust, not “hoarding wealth”. Since it’s been answered time and again could you just quote the part that answers my question?

I am asking about this passage:

> So no, we should want their greed exposed and not papered over by philanthropy so that the public eventually realizes that people accumulating and hoarding that much wealth is damaging to society and enact appropriate taxation schemes to claw back what they have stolen and prevent anyone else from ever doing it again.

It states explicitly that people are hoarding wealth and must be punished for it. For example, if your 401(k) is worth half a million dollars and your house is worth $1 million, a person living on $300 a month in a less privileged country might be forgiven for assuming that you should be punished for “hoarding“ wealth.

So I’m trying to understand what number hoarding starts at, and what the punishment should be.

[patentatt]

The short answer is that's a political question along the same lines as what should the minimum wage be, or what should the rate of taxation be? There is no one right answer for all times and all situations, and it should be determined through public debate and input via voting. We as a society operate in this manner in all sorts of ways, and it's not at all inconceivable that we could do the same here.

I think the guideposts should be to put limits on how much influence a single person should have in our society, or to limit the amount of influence we unintentionally give one person just by participating in the economy. For example, if I buy a product from a company that has a large advertising spend on Facebook, I am indirectly, perhaps even unknowingly adding to the personal wealth of Facebook's owner just because of some decisions that someone else made. Now the libertarian response to that is to research each and every product you buy, but that quickly becomes an impossible task for any one person to do, much less every person. Not only is the quantity of information too large, but some information is simply inaccessible to the public at large.

So, to answer your question more directly, I can give you my personal opinion. I think capital gains should be taxed the same as regular income, inheritance taxed as regular income, unrealized gains taxed as regular income (above some threshold perhaps), and progressive taxation to asymptotically approach 100%. Right now our top tax bracket ends at 37% at $539,900 income for an individual. It's at 35% for incomes from $215,950 to $539,900. I'd call that roughly a 2% rise for a ~250k rise for back-of-the-envelope calculation purposes. So linearly extrapolating that out, maybe the top tax bracket becomes 100% after somewhere around $10mm annual income. And since you pay taxes on that $10mm, you maybe can accumulate somewhere in the neighborhood of $5mm a year. And that's generous in my opinion, because lower income tax payers pay an 8% increase (24% to 32%) to go from ~$90k to ~$170k, so it's not like its a linear function for workers.

And then how do we 'catch up' on back taxes? You kind of establish a concept of a 'maximum wage' at some point in a progressive taxation scheme that approaches 100%. I think one fair-ish way of doing it would be to cap wealth at that level, so that if the maximum income is let's say $5mm, you can keep $5mm for each working year of your life, anything beyond that being due as back taxes. So if you're 65 you could still have ~$235mm, which seems like plenty to me. And when that person dies, their children's inheritance is taxed as regular income as well and effectively capped at $5mm or so (whatever it turns out to be), so there's little point to dying with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank.

Maybe not those exact numbers, but somewhere around there seems reasonable to me. But my opinion is just one opinion, and a big change like this should be determined through the political process with inputs from everybody.

[tomcam]

Thanks for a well-reasoned response (whose conclusions I view as disastrously bad). I genuinely appreciate your thought process.

I do agree completely agree with the final paragraph.

I’d prefer a simple 20% federal consumption tax on everything we buy, period, and no corporate welfare of any kind.

[AnimalMuppet]

I second the "disastrously bad". "Let's all vote on how much money you're allowed to have" is not going to end well.

But a 20% consumption tax isn't the answer. The problem the GP is trying to address is how much the rich have, not how much they spend. The rich spend less of what they have - that's how they stay rich. A spending tax won't touch them.

I agree that corporate welfare needs to go.

[foobarian]

I think one really good feature of Western capitalism is that the corporate sphere provides greedy sociopaths with an escape valve before they turn the path of Hitler, Putin, Stalin, etc. As hard it is to stand and watch these folks get rich on the backs of little people, it is still preferable to them climbing the military dictatorship ladder.