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Comment on Billionaires with $1 salaries – and other legal tax dodges the ultrawealthy use to keep their riches

the solution is to eliminate income taxes, and replace them with a national Land Value Tax on business properties, excise taxes and fines on anything that causes “negative externalities” (aka pollutants), and fees on every equities market transaction. That way these are way harder to avoid, and don’t depend on self reporting

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CriticalMiss@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Georgism? On my Lemmy? Based

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wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
While I agree with taxing the rich more, I think placing a recurring tax on static assets is the wrong way to do it.

I mean it already happens to ordinary folks. Even after paying off your mortgage, you still have to pay property taxes every year, and if you fail to comply they can seize the land that you supposedly own. Not only is this a detriment to the working class (at least, if we can manage to fix the system to the point where the working class can afford to buy houses again), but it also cultivates this mentality in which “landowners pay the public coffers, so the local governments are here to serve the landowners.”

I think a radical tax reform bill which shifts the burden of taxation back to the ultra-wealthy and corporations should have a one-time wealth tax that’s assessed to equalize the playing field and make up for decades of cronyism and corrupt supply-side economic policy letting businesses and oligarchs get away with not paying their fair share. After that, the bulk of tax revenue each year should come from capital gains.

i.e. if your net worth was a million dollars last year and you didn’t do any profiteering activities so it stays a million dollars this year, you don’t get taxed on the same wealth a second time. Otherwise rich people would never be able to abandon the toxic “grow or die” mindset, which is a false dichotomy as long as static wealth is only taxed once.

But if you have a billion dollars, and you make ten million dollars this year, then you’re taxed on those ten million dollars. You keep five million, the public gets five million, everybody’s happy. If any billionaire isn’t satisfied with making $5,000,000 in one year after taxes, then they’re irredeemably greedy and just need to get over it.

(Realistically if they have a billion dollars then they’re probably making at least fifty million (5% APY is a fairly conservative investment), and should pay the same tax bracket or higher).

There could also be a wealth cap, say at ten billion. There’s no legitimate reason anyone would even need that much, so they can’t complain that they’re being oppressed when anything above that amount gets seized by the public at the end of the tax year and used to fund education, healthcare, affordable housing, social work, job coaching, and nutritional assistance for all those people they’ve impoverished by exploiting in order to build their corporate empires on the backs of.

In addition to that, I agree that there should be hefty fines for any “externalized” costs, at least enough that it actually costs them less to comply with regulations and so there’s no incentive to just continue breaking the law and write off the fines as the cost of doing business.

Several repeated violations egregious enough should also result in prison sentences. Billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to get away with white collar crimes just because they can afford to get away with it.

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- TotalSonic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  your first concern is exactly why I noted that only business properties were to be taxed - in my idealistic proposal no ones primary residence (aka homestead) would ever be subjected to this, although perhaps secondary vacation homes could be. Noting that a Land Value Tax only taxes based on assessments of the market value of the unimproved land, so that it does not disincenttivize businesses from making improvements or developing on their land, as the tax stays the same regardless. In fact an LVT incentivizes businesses not to just sit on empty or decaying lots.
  
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