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by radlad 818 days ago
To summarize the thread so far, we need to create more money in circulation in order allow for more economy activity, and penalize preserving wealth in the form of capital.

Allegedly, "if you want to preserve wealth - it's easy just buy wealth (stocks, real estate, land)."

In other words, this is intentional to push people towards preserving wealth in the form of assets. But this creates issues where assets become over-valued - and some assets (real estate and land) are necessary to survive.

Your proposal is to tax the ownership of assets (i.e. the preservation of wealth) in order to ... push people back towards capital (i.e. for the preservation of wealth)?

This doesn't really compute.

2 comments

The point is to push people towards productive assets - investments in people building things - and to generally limit wealth preservation. Unlimited wealth preservation = dynasties, which is not a goal.

Inflation is a sort of (not very effective) flat wealth tax. But inflation is necessary because in a deflationary system the best investment is holding cash, which makes everything freeze up.

Wealth should be (minimally, progressively) taxed, mainly to prevent serious distortions when someone has $1B in the bank and most have $10K.

Taxes, regulations, and subsidies on assets needed to survive (shelter, utilities, food, medicine) are necessary to keep these items available to everyone, because the market tends to break down in these situations.

You've phrased it well, especially because taxes are (to first order) deflationary, as the negative of government spending; tax revenue is effectively taken out of circulation and deleted from the economy, while government spending is (effectively) money that is printed anew.