this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Wealth is not money. There's nothing to tax.
This is a very true statement.
Stocks won't get taxed unless they get actioned on. That is where the majority of their preceeded wealth is.
The US government is sovereign, it can very much either take ownership of the stock, or estimate its value and construct a loan that the company owners needs to pay back because they owe this tax. Or probably 100s of more clever solutions as well.
It can definitely decide to tax wealth if it wanted to, it could also break up large companies to at least spread the wealth of these institutions wider. It mostly just doesn't "want" to.
This argument is so unnecessary defeatist pretending the most militarised and police ridden country in the world has no power to enforce laws it could write.
Opposite to that notion I think if the US had any interest in fairness in taxation, especially on a more global scale, it could easily get all the common tax havens/financial secrecy jurisdictions, to fold to essentially whatever demands if has. But again it seems like the US government strangely doesn't really want that either.
Which is still the central issue the US government is more captured by the billionaire class than a lot of people like to think they are, and it's never just the dem or just the reps, it's large portions of both parties that are essentially captured in this way, or just fall into it because preserving the status quo is easy.
It's also real money, otherwise Musk couldn't have bought Twitter for $44 billion. He sure didn't have that amount on his bank account but he still bought it all the same, thus giving him a substantial soft power through information.
True, but that would mean to tax billionaires by taking money from their lenders?
I don't know, it just feels very convenient that wealth is considered money whenever is useful to the rich, and turns back into "wealth" a second later.
What I find unacceptable is the double standard. I'll keep the Musk example: a few banks and a few private companies made loans (which need to be reimbursed with real money) for Musk buying Twitter. A part of the exchange money came from the value of his own shares of Twitter (deducted from the 44b). Before that he has sold lots of Tesla shares which apparently gave him $20b in cash
Why do we accept that this not-money money can be turned into real money whenever convenient, but cannot be taxed the rest of the time?
There's a problem with how we accept to think of financial money. If it can't be taxed, then out shouldn't be defined as being an equivalent of real-economy money. Or maybe it should be evaluated in a more realistic way?
Not saying I have easy answers, but there's clearly a problem IMO.
Details of how they go about paying it is not really any of my business as long as it gets paid.
I think you meant to say “wealth is not income”. That’s the whole point of it being a “wealth tax”. That said, there’s pretty sound law arguing that wealth taxes are unconstitutional. There are far better ways to effect similar change, such as capital gains tax reform, and closing transfer tax exemption loopholes.