I don't really care about wealth inequality, but from a revenue perspective a wealth tax seems fantastic _if_ can be enacted and enforced.
Bill Gates came out in favor of a limited wealth tax as well - I think a mild cost to citizenship for the uber-wealthy is a great idea. Feels like political malpractice to not attempt it.
Sidebar:
> Kathy Herron, 56, a Republican who lives in Santa Rosa, California, said her support for Trump - a self-proclaimed billionaire - stems from his hardline policies on illegal immigration. In her view, the president would do well to support higher taxes on rich Americans. “We’re taxed from one end to the other, and it just seems the rich don’t pay their share,” she said.
Welfare chauvinism is an underrated political force in America. The next re-alignment will most likely be along these lines.
> from a revenue perspective a wealth tax seems fantastic
Amusingly, the current manifesto re wealth inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, pointed out that confiscatory taxes on the rich would be pointless re a revenue perspective. It turns out there are so few rich (e.g. the 1%) that even if you take all their money, it doesn't really dent our large government expenditures spent on the majority.
E.g. if the top tax rate went up to 70%, that would only be an extra 320 billion, which is only half medicare.
Which is of course exactly why politicians are pushing the idea of a wealth tax so hard. You can't get the kind of money required to fund their projects just by taxing the income of the rich. In order to come up with plausible-sounding figures and push their narrative that their proposals would totally be affordable if only we could make the evil wealthy pay up, they have to suggest converting a substantial proportion of the ultra-wealthy's total wealth into immediate, actual spending every year.
> When I say the government needs to raise more money, some people ask why Melinda and I don’t voluntarily pay more in taxes than the law requires. The answer is that simply leaving it up to people to give more than the government asks for is not a scalable solution. People pay taxes as an obligation of law and citizenship, not out of charity. Additional voluntary giving will never raise enough money for everything the government needs to do. If Melinda and I signed over our foundation’s entire endowment to the state of California, it wouldn’t be enough to fund their public schools for even one year. A vibrant economic system depends on setting expectations for who pays how much.
Bill Gates came out in favor of a limited wealth tax as well - I think a mild cost to citizenship for the uber-wealthy is a great idea. Feels like political malpractice to not attempt it.
Sidebar:
> Kathy Herron, 56, a Republican who lives in Santa Rosa, California, said her support for Trump - a self-proclaimed billionaire - stems from his hardline policies on illegal immigration. In her view, the president would do well to support higher taxes on rich Americans. “We’re taxed from one end to the other, and it just seems the rich don’t pay their share,” she said.
Welfare chauvinism is an underrated political force in America. The next re-alignment will most likely be along these lines.