[zeroonetwothree]

IMO capital gains taxes are bad as well, they discourage efficient investment allocation (you are stuck with what you have now).

It would be better if we mainly taxed consumption directly. If you are a billionaire but spend $100k/yr I am fine with you paying the same taxes as anyone else spending $100k/yr.

[rickydroll]

Taxing consumption hurts people more at the lower end of the income scale than at the higher end. It all comes down to what reserves you have to accommodate different scales of financial events. For example, will not having enough money for a tank of gas break you, or just annoy you? Could you survive needing an ambulance ride? Do copays keep you from seeing the doctor, or are they just a rounding error on your income?

I believe that taxing people proportionally on income earned by labor is a unifying element of a social contract. i.e., we are all contributing to the common good. Income from capital is "free money." You didn't work for it; you took it from somebody else in the form of interest, dividends, or some other rent-seeking financial magic.

At some point, wealth becomes corrosive to society. People acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.

That kind of non-beneficial use of wealth, rent-seeking, and financial magic should be the target of any tax system before taxing money earned by labor.

[lotsofpulp]

If having less money hurts people, then the government should give them more money.

Consumption taxes incentivize reducing waste and is pro environment. Isn't that what California is about?

>people acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.

So why are you a proponent of earned income taxes? Those hit people who make their money through labor. What you want is land value taxes, those hit people who make money through rent seeking (including tech companies whose assets sit on valuable land).

[iamnothere]

Consumption tax + land value tax + compensatory UBI should be a winning combination. Someone can hoard all they want but will pay when it comes time to spend the hoard.

You can also reduce or eliminate the tax on essentials like groceries.

Wealthy progressives don’t like it because many of them hold a huge portion of their wealth in housing. They imagine that they can somehow fix inequality without fixing distortions in the housing market.

[rickydroll]

As I said, I argue for some earned income tax. I'm a proponent of a progressive earned income tax as a way of reinforcing the social contract: we all contribute, we all benefit.

No one tax "solves" the problem. The problem, as I see it, is wealth hoarding beyond what any normal person would need to carry them through to the end of life. Instead of listing everything we should tax, maybe it'd be shorter to say that we look at what billionaires do to avoid taxes and close those loopholes. Then watching them again, and every time they come up with a new tax evasion strategy, fix it.

I wish I had the resources to develop an AI system that could find and document all instances of tax evasion by billionaires. But if I did that, I suspect I would need to be extra careful crossing streets, going near balconies, and reminding people that I'm not suicidal.

[lotsofpulp]

My issue is claiming the problem is wealth, and then wanting to tax income, which is not wealth. That is how rich people keep wealth taxes low (e.g. land value tax rates).

All wealth sits on land, and all land is already constantly appraised and subject to land value tax. It would be a trivial change to collect marginal land value tax rates using beneficial ownership.

As an additional benefit, the income tax return, which enables a ton of corruption at worst, and time waste at best, is gotten rid of.

[_DeadFred_]

If you are able to leverage the current value of stocks to gain personal benefit, you should be taxed on them as if you recognized the value. If you just let them sit, don't use them as collateral, don't take out loans against them, then they shouldn't be taxed.

But if you recognize some benefit based on their value, you absolutely should pay taxes on that value.