[BugsJustFindMe]

> On the other hand, almost a majority of people already pay no federal income tax anyways.

That's an irrelevant diversion though, because the measure that matters when discussing the fairness of taxes is how much people are left with at the end after paying whatever taxes they pay, including sales tax, income tax, and any other kind of tax. And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none, and for the people for whom a wealth tax would even apply the answer is unimaginable amounts.

[credit_guy]

That's not all that matters. The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society. And thinking that billionaires will just take a wealth tax as served, and perhaps will ask "can I have some more" is one way to think about this, but probably not the best way. A better way to think is that action might be followed by reaction. There is no manifest destiny for California to be the epicenter of tech.

[m11a]

California already has very high taxes. I think marginal tax rates are higher in California than for UK tax residents, certainly for CGT, and roughly similar for income tax.

I'd say the fact that California remains the epicenter of tech despite its high taxes suggests concentration of talent matters far more than tax rates.

[disgruntledphd2]

Yeah, the marginal rates for California are approximately the same as I pay in Ireland. The capital gains taxes are way lower though.

[mannanj]

Does the government not have the goal to make society a more just society? When did that stop being a priority of government? Even a teeny, tiny one?

[credit_guy]

Sure, the government has that goal too. But the government has many tools, and using taxes for that is using the wrong tool. Or maybe you think that billionaires owe us not only to pay taxes, but also to play nice, and pay those taxes with a smile on their face?

[breakyerself]

Billionares shouldn't exist. We shouldn't just tax them for the revenue. We should tax them to limit the undemocratic power that comes with excessive wealth.

[mannanj]

Agreed. Humans evolved in a tribal, local community leadership system. To have as much wealth as millions of people that you never interact with should not exist as a person. It is against the system principles of humanity; either create a new species and turn the billionaires into them, or balance the system.

[ethbr1]

> pay those taxes with a smile on their face

The government's monopoly on punitive violence isn't only intended for the peasantry...

[mannanj]

Funding the government, which has the goal to create a more just society, means taxes should support that.

If you're not using your funding to support your goals, thats corruption.

[credit_guy]

This is wishful thinking. Billionaires can vote with their feet, or can pay expensive lawyers and accountants to find all the possible loopholes to not pay those taxes. California wants to tax Elon Musk for his trillion dollars. But how much of that trillion dollars was generated in California? He has a very valid claim that a lot of it was generated in Texas, and he'll go all the way to the Supreme Court with that.

People can vote that a new tax should be levied on billionaires, but can't vote how those billionaires will react to the tax. Moving out of state is one option (see Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc). Hiring armies of lawyers to challenge any wealth assessment is another. Litigating to the Supreme Court yet another. I'm not a billionaire and never will be, but if I can think of these few ideas, they can think of 100 times more.

[mannanj]

It's wishful to ask the system designed for a goal, to do the goal?

[lovelearning]

What are those other tools?

[well_ackshually]

>and pay those taxes with a smile on their face?

Considering the alternative for them over the past millennia has been, inevitably that they get caught, hanged, quartered, beaten and other various violent methods: yes, they should smile, they're buying their lives with all that money :)

[robocat]

> they're buying their lives

Extortion is the word that summarizes your point.

[well_ackshually]

Ah yes, extortion is not the part where their disproportionate centralisation of wealth threatens your very livelihood with every action they take. Extortion isn't when they happily tell you they're going to replace you with AI. Extortion isn't when they steal your money with unpaid hours, it isn't when they threaten to fire you if you don't shut the fuck up and do as they say, when they act as a state within the state, corrupting institutions and polluting the very ground you, your children and your food grow on, it's when they're being held accountable for their actions and told that if they're going to have a personal wealth equal to that of millions, they also have the sum of responsibilities of these millions.

Just so you know, careers as a bootlicker are kind of a dead end.

[Nasrudith]

You clearly don't understand psychology at all. Rule by fear has a major downside that Machivelli warned about. If you keep people under threat all the time, as soon as the threat fails and you can no longer point a gun at your head they preemptively kill you and feel good about it.

Threatening violence to get what you want always ends with you being out-violenced by a bigger thug.

[mannanj]

This is how alpha chimps function in their tribe. They resort to war and violence to prolong their rule, and it works for long enough, thats all they need for the cost-benefits to be worth it on their side.

In humanity, being the alpha chimp, you can actually just run away from the tribe with all your wealth instead of outright die and form a new identity and start a life elsewhere and change your last name and go somewhere not well known, and if you and your family does this for enough generations you are forgotten.

I think this might explain the rotten apples at the tip-top of our industrial/societal wealth classes. I think they are these people, played out over generations, having somehow survived the system that used to make it impossible to do this when at the chimp level (or even medieval maybe, maybe this new form of evasion only arose in the industrial age).

[well_ackshually]

It's only by fear if they don't understand how to restrain themselves. Behave well with all your wealth, and nothing will happen: it's the same reason why wealthy patrons of art and craftsmen were at least respected, and why things ended poorly for robber barons.

And no, I do not believe that Musk's flabby arms or Bezos' shiny head are a threat of bigger violence to me anyways.

[georgemcbay]

> The main reason to have taxes is to fund the government, not to make society a more just society.

Both are important reasons for taxes.

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." (often attributed to Louis Brandeis, though he probably never said exactly the quote)

Taxation is one of the primary tools for avoiding destructive levels of wealth concentration.

Of course, the wealthy decry this as unfair wealth redistribution but all governments engage in constant wealth redistribution.

In the US we happen to have decided (since the Reagan era) that through increasingly regressive taxes the redistribution will almost always function upwards, ultimately resulting in the oligarchical dismantling of our government that we find ourselves in today.

[roenxi]

There is no consensus on what is "fair" to tax, you can find people arguing from 0% to 100%. And if we're talking about measures of fairness. A much better measure is something like trying to maximise the median living standard without sacrificing any one demographic.

> And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none...

So... where are the real resources coming from then? Because if these people aren't using them to support their living standards they must be doing something else. If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something.

Because I agree that the taxes aren't going to come out of the wealthy's living standards, but the implications of that in practice are not good.

[ethbr1]

> If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something.

Yes, and that "somewhere else" is others' excess profit.

That excess profit comes from (a) inventing or investing capital with a return or (b) paying less for goods / labor than they can be sold for.

Capitalist profit has always been equal parts ingenuity and fucking other people over, and as most often implemented makes no discrimination between the two.

The bargain by which this has traditionally been squared is "the person who made the profit gets to keep some of it" + "they pay the rest in taxes to support the society they're successful in and depend on."

Unfortunately over the years this has continually been eroded by capital's invasion into democracy, with the express purpose of neutering the latter part of that bargain.

Those who would be hit with a wealth tax are incensed by it precisely because it would be less avoidable than the myriad of loopholes that have been engineered into income taxes.

[roenxi]

And in terms of real resources - who do you expect to have less and what do you expect them to have less of? Because "excess profit" is an economic concept, not a real thing.

[ethbr1]

By using progressive taxes, either wealth or income, those who benefited from the current system get to keep some of those excess benefits, while keeping less than they would under a no tax system.

[roenxi]

No, I mean real resources as in tangible ones. Although in this case I'd also be interested in redirected labour even though that isn't really a tangible asset. Like if you were explaining to someone who didn't speak english and you had to point at the things that the wealthy control that you want to tax away from them, what real objects do you point at?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource#Tangible_versus_intan...

[ethbr1]

Why does tangible vs intangible matter?

For the last ~3000 years of human history, wealth has been liquid via some form of money.

[Nasrudith]

Excess profit is a stupid fairy tale told by the bearded idiot. It is literally impossible to not retroactively 'exploit' somebody. Not just in the practical 'need to know what the end user will do with it to avoid them making an excess profit' but if the value changes over time they need to somehow predict that perfectly or else be guilty of exploitation. The notion itself always assumes that the capitalist should get absolutely nothing because he isn't doing "real work" and then ignores how things fall apart without them, or how much that the worker would have to do to substitute for them.

Ironically the communists have managed to out-greed the capitalists through this one fantastical concepts. Capitalists accept that they need to pay people to get their inputs and try to make the most of it one way or another. Communists are kept up at night at by the thought that somebody else may have made a penny off of their labor, and think that they need to murder them for it.

[ethbr1]

The "excess" in "excess profits" means profits greater than what a fully-competitive, perfect market would allow.

No one would be paying Apple or Google 30% of their revenue if there were infinite alternative app distribution options.

The essence of post-capitalism is that a lack of market intervention allows monopolies to not just grow (probably fine in limited niches with regulatory bounds) but also to rent seek without investing and adding value.

So yes, profit is a motivational force that has outperformed all others to date in aligning individual action with market desires.

But the excess profit era the US has been sliding towards for decades is not a free market.

When was the last time a large corporation was forcibly broken up?

[specialist]

> A much better measure is something like...

Yes. Focus on outcomes.

Pick a target amount of inequity. Act to hit that goal. Adjust as needed.

For example, I advocate restoring our gini coefficient from the current 0.48 (?) back to 1970s era 0.35. People smarter than me will figure out how to best measure inequity, ideal targets, and implementation details.

Arguing about all the misc tax rates, purposefully ignoring the macro, is an obfuscation strategy to prevent taking any action at all. Straight out of the CIA's field guide on sabotage.

[cherry_tree]

There is very little debate that you should be taxed proportionally to your total wealth; I.e. that the rich should pay more than the poor. In fact the only people trying to debate this are the rich who want to avoid paying back towards the society that enabled their success.

[roenxi]

> I.e. that the rich should pay more than the poor

How else could it work? The poor don't have enough money to tax them. That's why they're poor. Schemes where the rich don't get taxed are systems that tend towards the 0% tax for everyone end of the spectrum.