And what would happen if we did?
It’s possible, but usually harder because what makes the uber wealthy uber wealthy is that they own assets rather than have huge income.
So when they say Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Bezos or whoever has “X” billions, they’re talking about the value of assets they own (usually large stakes in successful companies) which has more of a parallel with how the middle class talk about their house (an asset) now being worth (whatever). It’s not liquid cash.
Taxes on assets are typically realised when those assets are sold or transferred because their value goes up and down and all over the place. And the uber wealthy do pay tax whenever they sell stock because they’re buying this mansion or that yacht. It’s just usually comparatively small to their full fortune which remains in stock.
So the difficult thing about taxing stock while it’s owned is, like I said, the value goes up and down quite dramatically at times. Should the government collect taxes on the buoyant times but then refund them during market downturns? That would be a nightmare. No government wants to be on the hook for refunds during a downturn.
And it can’t (I don’t think) just collect taxes when super valuable stocks are on the way up because that’s not actually cash. It’s just the market value if that stock were to be sold. So the most a government could do would be either to receive some of the stock as a tax payment (not much use to a government that wants to spend it) or force the owners of companies to sell stock and make a cash payment just because they’re successful.
Which sounds fine on the surface, but this messes up how ownership of companies works. Let’s say some good guy CEO (they do exist) has managed the growth of a multi billion business and to do so has brought in investors which now own 49% of the company, and he - the founder - owns 51%. If the company’s value on the market rose 20% you’d get news articles about how the founder now has “XX billion” since last year and that they “earn” so many hundreds of thousands a day compared to your average working class person. If the government forced the owner to part with 3% of their ownership of the company in order to pay this “growth tax” then the founder no longer has overall control of the company. It would be 48% founder owner, 49% investors and 3% whoever the government sell the taxed stock to in order to realise a cash value.
So it erodes ownership. Again I’m sure there are plenty reading this who think “so what?”. But I can tell you that much of the market value of stock, the reason it has the value it does, is in many cases because the market trusts the management of the ownership of the companies to continue to make profit. If you force the erosion of that just because the company did well then you destroy the way the market trusts and ascribes value to things. Which is why the way governments tax company is via profits and stock sales, where the value is already realised or where the decision to sell is not forced in the same way.
So what to do about this?
Well you can just increase the taxes on stock sale, or on dividend income. But what happens there is you snare the wealthy middle class with the same rope you were aiming at the uber wealthy. Again some might not think that a bad thing, but it’s unlikely to be as effective as people would like it to be. You’d generally be raising dividend tax by a percentage point or two on people receiving low six figure sums. Which would get some extra from the Elon Musks, but also would get the same amount from, say, a consultant surgeon, or a recent tech startup founder etc. My point being, there are not huge numbers of these people, compared to the rest of the population that government spending is spread over. The amount you end up raising is not huge compared to what seemed to be on offer when you look at Meta’s total net worth or something like that.
The ultimate answer is about ownership. But it has to be organic (personal opinion) so that it doesn’t cause disruption to the markets that end up hurting the most vulnerable (via job losses).
And the best way this is done is to simply suck it up and pay a little more for a non mega corp solution to something. Want Bezos to have less of the pie? Stop buying through Amazon just because it’s cheaper. Want Gates fortune to be more wide spread? Save yourself a ton of cash by using Linux instead of windows + office licences. Don’t like Elon musk? Stop using twitter, don’t buy a Tesla.
If you’ve done all these things I personally think it’s as much as you can do. You should put your efforts into making these boycots as easy for others to follow as possible (support your favourite FOSS project) etc. Pay for the online services you like so they don’t feel the need to resort to Google ads and on. Unfortunately in a free market such as the ones many of us live in (thinking Western world) the uber wealthy are mainly that because of the millions and millions of micro choices by consumers who are free to go elsewhere but just often don’t choose to.
There’s also the very important concept of a capital gains tax. Why does their income from stock sales get to be taxed at a special low rate, as if it weren’t income? That’s ridiculous
We’d go a long way toward evening it out just by deciding
- income is income. No special categories of income for the wealthy
- when your company or trust spends money on your personal life, that’s also income
- tax brackets keep going. They don’t even have to be specially high, but why does it top out so early?
Assets are taxed all the time (real estate tax, car tax… ). So taxing the value of a share portfolio at the 31st of December each year is perfectly doable. And if it has depreciated since last year, you get a tax deduction… which is capped by the income tax to maximally reach 0… No carrying over till next year… or maybe 1 year… whatever, that’s implementation details.
How much do you tax these assets is the point that needs consideration… it’s not fully income… But a percentage is only fair. And if this means people need to realize gains to pay for it… that’s fine… Why would it not be?
And borrowing against an asset portfolio should mean that it counts as realizing gains of the asset portfolio and the amount is seen as income and thus taxed. (You loan 10 million against your shares, that’s income) And to avoid fallout for the normal people you can build in a threshold and exclusions for example for the first million in your lifetime… or for the mortgage on your primary residence with a cap at the median house price or … something. So for these people borrowing against assets means they can keep the assets… but pay interest on the loan. Alternatively they can actually realize the gains and pay cash.
It’s not hard at all, it’s a matter of political will, and writing proper laws that state your objective and exceptions.
While the ultra wealthy don’t have billions on hand, they do take loans against their assets, which we could tax more.
Should. They should be taxed extremely heavily to try and stop that loop hole and abuse of power.
What about loans against assets like houses? I wouldn’t consider simple house owners necessarily rich and they should be able to get a mortgage without penalty.
Exclude a mortgage for your primary residence, capped at the median house price or something… And only exclude it IF it is paid back in full over a max period.
This is the case in the Netherlands… paid back in full after max 30 years… No cap in how much. This was because the interest on the mortgage are tax deductible. So some bankers figured… we keep the loan maxed, and put your paybacks in a special fund… and at the end of the 30 years the fund pays back the mortgage. That way we get max interests and you get max tax break. In the end the banks made a lot of public funds private this way.
You know, you can just do things. Like, laws don’t need to be applied unilaterally. You can, at the same time, tax a 100,000,000 dollar loan, and not tax a 1,000,000 dollar loan.
Kind of like how generally, low income people do not pay much or any income taxes, or how certain products are subject to additional sales taxes.
Why? Are any loans ever taxed?
There were tax evasion schemes in the UK where wealthy people could take loans from an offshore entity they contributed to and never pay the loans back. But this was shutdown fairly quickly by HMRC (British IRS) and a bunch of people were fined / went to jail. Don’t know if the same is true in America?
If a loan is acting as income (like it does for the ultra wealthy) then it should be treated like income and taxed accordingly.
so, going back to your analogy of thinking of stock like homes, we pay property tax on our homes if we own them. Not much, comparatively, but we pay tax on it nonetheless. If stocks are an asset like a home, they should be taxed based on the value of those stocks.
Companies do pay other taxes roughly comparable to their size, I was just simplifying for the sake of explanation. Employee tax is one example. Don’t know how it works in the US but in the UK all businesses will pay a “national insurance” tax contribution for every employee they have. This is a level that can be turned by the treasury. But increasing any tax burden discourages the activity that leads to it. Taxes on employees, although paid by companies, are seen as “anti job” taxes. Taxes on profits are seen as “punishment” for honestly raising a profit in the home country (rather than various offshore licensing schemes). The raw market value of a company could be taxed, but that sort of perversely encourages a company to downplay its value.
Ultimately we want companies to be successful, the only issue with it is when the ownership is concentrated in the hands of the very few. Unfortunately that appears to be what drives success in many cases. Small ownership = focussed quick decision making. Sometimes that really is what’s led to an American company seeing the success it does rather than some Chinese competitor gaining the edge.
That’s why I throw a lot of this back on consumers. We’re the democratic force in all this, and we have a lot of power when we act en masse. Why is there one Amazon instead of two? Because people also choose cheapest and they fail to properly value the fact they can have all sorts next day (even same day) when that service never existed ten plus years ago. If they valued that properly then they’d be more able to see competitor B at $10 is still providing them good value service even if Amazon is selling the same at $7.
I’m not sure that’s it’s healthy to stop people having free choice of where to shop. People being able to vote with their money is what makes capitalist countries the innovation experts of the world.
The issue is what happens when that capital concentrated into a small number of hands starts to wield anti-choice power and / or political power. So I think people building successful companies and being wildly rich (on paper) is fine, but legislation should stop them hoovering up smaller competitors (anti trust laws). And money should certainly be capped and prevented from undue influence in political processes.
The US and UK are quite different in that regard. Our anti trust laws could be better, but at least our political processes are relatively short and the use of money in them held to a reasonably high level of disclosure. Both could be improved.
And I think they will when the population elects a social-good minded government that’s pro business. Typically in the past I’d personally say this mostly lines up with what used to be called New Labour. They certainly did some social good but they made some appalling mistakes trying to partner with business.
I don’t know that the equivalent hope in the US is. I see the democrats gets criticised a lot of not being well connected to working class people and too cosy with big business. But campaign finance laws would need to change before the way in which money and politics interacts could ever reasonably change.
Which all feels a bit far off, which is why I come back to what small actions individuals can do… Buy local, from small businesses, be prepared to spend more to spread wealth a little more evenly, buy domestic, not foreign, avoid the services of megacorps wherever you can, enable others to do the same. Who knows? Can you imagine a community run Amazon that cost a bit more but funneled profits back into the local community? Things like this can be tackled by a relatively small band of motivated individuals regardless of what’s going on in the halls of power.
Except your argument on small ownership is quick decision making has a counter arguement… shareholders… they appoint a small group for daily operations and decisionmaking. But the real power is with the shareholder meeting and a large group of possibly anonymous owners.
If we disallowed margin loans from brokerage accounts then the uber wealthy would be forced to pay more taxes. We can easily avoid impacting the middle class with marginal tax brackets.
go lookup the tax rates in the 60s/70s. we used to
The highest bracket was taxed at 70% until Reagan’s first plan in 1981 lowered it to 50%.
It’s currently at 37% under Trump’s 2018 tax plan.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/
Keep in mind that’s Income Tax. Most rich people don’t actually have income, they have capital gains.
peaked during ww2 at 94% on high incomes (over what would be about 2.5m today). stayed at 70% or above until reagan… the entire 50s, 60s, and 70s.
eyup
I like Bernie’s idea of taxing every trade on the stock market.
Why that would be huge:
It would incentize the rich to hold stocks long term, this would lead to corporations thinking more than what profits are in 3 months.
Which translates to greater stability for other investors and job security for the people who work there.
But it’s never going to happen as long as
SmaugPelosi and people like her who’s main priority is personal wealth is running the Dem party. Because we all know Republicans will never support it.But if we don’t purge the Dem party of neo liberals, and fast, we’re all fucked. We can’t keep walking down the path of “the rich always get richer” like nothing is wrong.
Wealth is finite. And without taxes and regulations the people who already have a lot will always accumulate more faster than they can spend it.
With them hoarding all that wealth, no one else has any.
Not only that. It stops a lot of the AI micro trading bullshit
Meanwhile down on earth, you’ve just caused an entirely new class of derrivatives traded on sketchy and unregulated markets, increasing the risk of fraud to all, including small individual investors.
Wealth is finite
The size of the observable universe is ~93 billion light-years. So, you’re technically right, but…
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, but I’m not expecting you clarifying to help
Well, a lot of stock trading isn’t as simple as just stock picking, buying and selling individual stocks.
Much of the market is made up of derivatives trading, such as options, where you aren’t trading the stock itself, instead you are trading the option to buy the stock.
The value of the option is derived from the value of the underlying asset, but it is not absolutely coupled to it (this is how a lot of the money is made, by finding market inefficiencies and capitalizing on things like slippage, where there is a mismatch in the value of the derivative and it’s underlying)
What the person above is saying is that, when it becomes no longer profitable to trade underlying assets directly, new derivative markets will be invented that trade around other underlying assets.
Think about unregulated Bitcoin trading for example, while contrived, imagine a crypto currency that is coupled with the price of another asset (these exist, like USDcoin) such as a stock, future, option, or something else.
I should add, typically the derivative kind of collapse into the underlying at some point, but in the case of an option, it might be traded 100 times before that happens, during each of those trades the actual asset (e.g. the underlying stock) doesn’t actually change possession, and a given side of the contract may or may not be changing possession. If you write a call option for a 100 shares of Ford you own, you aren’t selling the stock unless the actual call gets assigned and you are required to fulfill the contract, but the ‘buyer’ side of the contract could have been sold 100 times in the meantime.
All this to say, it’s complicated and there are lots of opportunities for shady shit to happen.
Even a 1 or 2% per trade would bring massive amounts of money, not even trying to make it progressive or anything.
Not even that; 0.1% per trade would bring in a huge windfall. Even something negligible like 0.01% would bring in nontrivial amounts of revenue.
The problem is that being above paying tax has become part of the identity of being rich, and the very idea of even a negligible amount of one’s wealth being taken away to be given to your inferiors is unacceptable, and the rich will defend every fluctuating cent of their wealth as a non-negotiable matter of honour, even if it means burning down the world.
Years ago they tried to pass a minimum amount of time you had to hold a stock before selling…
It was a fraction of a second and neoliberals and Republicans immediately united to tell everyone how antithetical to America that was.
For some reason, that wasn’t enough to show people that both groups have the same priorities and we can’t fight an oligarchy with fucking oligarchs.
We’ll never win if only a handful of politicians are actually on our side.
But it’s almost impossible to compete against dark money in a primary, and the people running the DNC know that. So they’ll never agree to get dark money out of primaries. It’s the only reason they’re still holding back progressives.
Most of the rich cannot just move to a tax haven. Sure someone who inherited multi-generational wealth can hide it in the Caiman island.
But if you own a canned tomato factory, or even if you’re a business consultant, you get rich because of very local things, and can’t easily move-it away.
I say we tax them 9x19 times.
Has that been tried since 1790 when the french decided to behead all the rich people?
most effective tax reform
Yeah they only wanted the top 10% of the top 10%
In my limited understanding, yes, it’s possible. But it would require significant international effort to get the super rich, the ones that can pay fabulous amounts of money to
money laundererslegal tax experts that know just the right loophole to ensure that mr. billionaire will pay only 500k in taxes rather than 10 million, because tax havens only exist thanks to certain countries’ very lax rules on banking.I doubt it, at least in the US. The rich have a lot of influence over how laws are made, and I don’t really see any appetite to pay a greater share.
