[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.