Comment on Poignant post on the state of things
okamiueru@lemmy.world 9 months agoSales tax on everything… isn’t a tax on wealth. Why not just do some of the things Scandinavian countries do?
Why is it so all-or-nothing on any one idea? There is a lot of nuance in how you tax income, and the teeth and regulation in order to effectively tax corporations. Anything over 400k, taxed at 90%.
Doesn’t help that politics are very corrupt, politicians can do insider trading, media is owned by private interests, unions are demonised and unsurprisingly workers rights are almost non-existent, and you have a two party system that’s deeply flawed.
The US had a real shot at moving in the right direction, but the DNC saw it fit to sabotage it’s own candidate. I’d imagine treason charges for so something like that… but, not even an apology.
Anyways…
jimbolauski@lemm.ee 9 months ago
You don’t need to tax wealth. Amased wealth will be taxed when the wealth is spent.
okamiueru@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I understood your argument. It’s just not how it works. Even if amassed wealth was used to buy stuff as a exchange of goods, it wouldn’t be anything significant, and it would be less significant the more wealth we’re talking about. That in itself should clue you in on why this doesn’t work.
jimbolauski@lemm.ee 9 months ago
The thing a consumption tax fixes is eliminating all the tax avoidance schemes. People living off their wealth don’t pay high taxes, they take out loans against their wealth and pay the loan back at 5% instead of the 20% capital gains tax. Carl Icahn, an investor was able to pay no income tax using this scheme. He had an adjusted gross income of $544 million but deducted it all from paying his 1.2 billion dollar loan.
okamiueru@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That’s… why you might want to tax wealth? Sales tax does literally nothing to address the problem you describe. Income tax does address some of it. Removing it just because it doesn’t address all of it is absurd. Thinking it is covered by sales tax, is even more so. Just because one aspect doesn’t cover everything doesn’t mean you remove it all-together and replace it with… well, I’m still curious.
The ways to circumvent this is what you go after, but you don’t do that by just removing existing obstacles. You tax income, but you adjust it to tax the high income earners much more. You evaluate wealth and tax that. You put a tax on absurd inheritances. You limit the profitability of trading necessities as goods by also high taxation.
The only thing I objected to in your original comment was to suggest 0% tax on income… and that this is compensated for by increasing sales tax… as if it solves anything at all. Income tax accounts for about 50% of the US federal budget. Tricks to avoid paying income tax are well known, but the idea of not addressing the issue, but instead just “start from scratch”, or suggest to remove something fundamental to the function of a modern state, is … tiresomely American.