[ryandrake]

The current system without wealth taxes already largely divorces labor from equity stake. Unless you're one of the relatively few tech or office workers who get equity compensation or have a large savings rate, you currently don't have much of a stake in any means of production.

[tengbretson]

I'm not disputing the claim that few people are able to save and invest into having a stake in the means of production.

However, if your goal is to increase stakeholdership, how would a policy that explicitly disincentivizes that behavior fix anything?

[smallmancontrov]

Why do I get the feeling that you would never field the structurally identical complaint against disproportionately taxing labor and consumption, even though that's a much more prominent feature of our current tax policy?

In any case, taxes do not go into a black hole, no matter how much the right likes to encourage this self-serving fiction. Taxes generally get spent down the economic ladder and move people up the economic ladder, increasing their marginal propensity to save. People must have money if you want them to save money.

Even more concretely: reversing the policies which dissolved the middle class might reasonably be expected to restore the middle class, or at least slow their demise.

[svachalek]

How does it disincentivize "stakeholdership"? Are people expected to say, please don't make me rich, because I'd have to pay 1% of it?

[notahacker]

Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets.

But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers, which means that there's a lot less cause for concern about those workers not owning their means of production

[gruez]

>Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets.

Even assuming this is true, then what? Do you think the average joe is going to suddenly buy alphabet or meta stocks because bill ackman or ken griffin sold their shares to buy bigger yachts?

[notahacker]

Perhaps you could direct this strawman upthread, to the person who implied that to enable the average joe to obtain a share in the means of wealth creation it would be necessary for the HNW individuals who currently own it to be able to maintain that ownership without paying tax on it...

All I pointed out was that at the margin, HNW individuals needing to liquidate 1% of their portfolio every year (and also HNW individuals not being disincentived from realising their capital gains as under the current system) actually works in favour of people trying to buy shares in means of production (by increasing liquidity and lowering prices), as well as obviously against wealth concentration.

There are arguments against wealth taxes that are actually credible, like those concerning capital flight, but this thread seems like a magnet for bad ones. Like, AMZN valuation dropping slightly at the margin from Bezos at al's forced divestment of portions of their stock actually being a bad thing for the economy as a whole is a defensible position; the utopian scenario involving delivery drivers ending up with a decent sized stake in Amazon somehow being impeded by wealth taxes isn't....

[tengbretson]

> Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets.

To whom are the selling? The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax due to their existing systemic advantages, like economies of scale or regulatory lobbying. This would accelerate consolidation.

> But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers

At this point I think there is ample evidence that policy in this country does not move forward without the consent of these so-called privileged stakeholders. If you take that as a given, why would you support handing these people an economic machine gun to point at your future self?

[notahacker]

> To whom are the selling? The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax due to their existing systemic advantages, like economies of scale or regulatory lobbying. This would accelerate consolidation.

You don't need "systemic advantages" to earn more than 1% average annual return on your wealth. And strangely enough, not paying tax on their wealth accumulation whilst everyone else pays it on their earnings and trades doesn't reduce prospective buyers' advantages...

> At this point I think there is ample evidence that policy in this country does not move forward without the consent of these so-called privileged stakeholders. If you take that as a given, why would you support handing these people an economic machine gun to point at your future self?

Using pretty phrases like "economic machine guns" doesn't somehow make an argument of the form that wealth taxes somehow make wealthy people more powerful actually make sense.

[frmersdog]

>The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax

Or people who aren't wealthy enough to have to pay it.