Comment on If AI takes most of our jobs, money as we know it will be over. What then?

• _g_be@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I mean, those are kinda two sides of the same coin. Both ways to limit the compounding of wealth in few hands.

  I’m open to all these ideas, and more

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  • PrivacyDingus@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Wealth and income are two different things. We should tax wealth savagely, i.e., the ownership of assets, and we should also tax income, but to a lesser degree.

    Just to level set: income refers to the flow of money earned over a period, like a salary or wages, while wealth represents the accumulated assets minus liabilities at a specific point in time

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• Vinstaal0@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  You can be as wealthy as you want, but once you die, it all goes back to the common pot.

  So that 18-year-old that loses both his parents will inherent nothing? So he would have to live on the street or something? Or that women who lose their husband, so inheriting the other half of their combined income? Which will cause her to lose the house etc?

  Inheriting a couple 100k or even a mill isn’t really the issue. Do tax it, yes, but 100% tax on anything is unreasonable, or at least if that happens at once. That’s why we have multiple different taxes.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I think we should instead cap inheritance/gifts, not income.

    The cap wouldn’t be zero, it would probably be in the low millions. If your parents were wealthy, you’d have a head start, but you would still need to work. There could be a separate exclusion for spouses, where maybe they keep half of the wealth or something as a one-time transfer (i.e. if they get remarried, that wealth wouldn’t transfer to the new spouse).

    As part of this, I also want to rework corporations and trusts. Basically, the only legal entity that gets special tax treatment are corporations with low valuation, once you go public or report net income or revenue over some amount, the legal protections go away. So mom and pop shops would get bankruptcy protection and whatnot, but large corporations wouldn’t.

    But all of that overcomplicates what I wanted to communicate, which is that generational wealth shouldn’t be a thing. Property should be community owned and exclusivity agreements should be temporary (i.e. real estate should be owned until death).

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    • Vinstaal0@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      You still wouldn’t want to do any taxation at 100%, make it 70 or 80% sure, but 100% is just bullshit and 70-80% will be enough. The way to get people to accept higher taxes is to explain it to hem. People will also do everything in their power to not pay that 100% tax, including just stopping their Dang business for that year if corporate income would be taxed at 100%

      The spousal thing is generally solved in the world by giving an exception, in NL it’s like the first 800k is tax-free when your legal spouse dies.

      Money inside companies is just money that will be taxed at a later date, the issue is that billionaires in the US put their stocks up as collateral taking out loans. It would be taxed again if they dividend it out or pay themselves somewhat of a wage.

      The issue with companies is that evaluating them is something that you just cannot easily do every year for the tax report, unless you just go look at the equity = company value. We do have some designation for small, median and large companies based on revenue, balance total and FTE count, well at least in NL it is based on those 3.

      Small companies need some tax breaks and larger companies don’t, but a lot of companies are split up to multiple different companies to be able to benefit from tax breaks.

      Property should be community owned and exclusivity agreements should be temporary (i.e. real estate should be owned until death).

      Owning a single property is not the issue, every family should be able to own one. It’s the fact that people own multiple properties. You want to make it so it is not a good financial decision to own multiple properties, either you as a business or you as a person.

      generational wealth shouldn’t be a thing. You mean massive amount of generational wealth, but in my example that kid that lost his parents should still inherent that house right?

      Just increase the inheritance tax for everything after a mil or so. It’s still a couple taxation, but hey

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        The idea is rooted in the same ideas that Georgism is based on, which is the idea that people should own the value they create themselves, whereas things like property should be communally owned. Inheritance money isn’t created value, so I think there’s a good argument that it should be capped, and any excess should go to the people…

        I don’t believe in inheritance tax to fund the government though, it should merely be redistributed either as cash or donations to unaffiliated charities. The only tax used to fund governments should be land value taxes.

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