Its a one time tax that is expected to raise $100 billion over 5 years, with a bulk of that payment going to preserve existing medical, education and food support programs due to federal budget shortfalls. However without a concerted effort to make these programs more efficient and accountable, its very likely that we are faced with the same budget crisis over and over again. We see this all the time with the government shutdown theater every few years, but guess this is just how the country functions. At some point this has to break the system though!
> Larry and Sergey can’t stay in California since the wealth tax as written would confiscate 50% of their Alphabet shares.
> Each own ~3% of Alphabet's stock, worth about $120 billion each at today's ~$4 trillion market cap.
> But because their shares have 10x voting power, the SEIU-UHW California billionaire tax would treat them as owning 30% of Alphabet (3% × 10 = 30%). That means each founder's taxable wealth would be $1.2 trillion.
> A 5% wealth tax on $1.2 trillion = $60 billion tax bill, each.
I sincerely hope the notion that avoiding your taxes is theft from the public at large returns in any semblance sooner rather than later.
Nobody likes paying for taxes but the notion that all of these billionaires became as such without utilizing any resources or regulations paid for by the public is completely upside down (to put it as gently as possible)
These people are stealing from you. Jail them like the thieves they are or make them pay back into the system from which they so happily benefited.
The notion that someone keeping what they earn is "theft" while having something forcibly taken from them via taxation isn't, is wild.
I agree everyone should pay taxes, including billionaires, but this is like saying if my neighbor doesn't give me his couch, he's stealing from me. It's just logically (and morally) wrong.
The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.
For simplicity we only do this when a sale of an asset is made.
Claiming that adjusting this timing is theft is ridiculous, Larry Page has a debt that hasn't come due for his profits is all. Adjusting the timing on the payments of that debt isn't theft.
Per capita the rich get the best deal BTW as billionaires don't exist by a few orders of magnitude without the benefits of society. Sure they pay more taxes but they also benefit massively in comparison to most people in absolute terms of benefit.
>>The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.
Forgive me if I do not accept the proposition that the non-wealthy had equal influence in the decision how to fund the government. The wealthy decided 'wages earned' would be the determining factor to fund the government, not wealth. I guess I would have done the same if I had so much wealth I didn't need to earn a wage.
However it is accomplished, all citizens should share the same impact on their lives ( wealth being the best approximation I can think of ) in contributing to the annual cost of funding the government.
Put another way: it is immoral for the wealthiest and most powerful in society to shift the burden of paying for government away from themselves and onto the rest of society.
Historically it was fine because dividends were significant and counted as income.
Unfortunately everyone realized the stock market is a shell game where there is no price limit and capital gains doesn't kick in until you sell and even then at a reduced rate...
This proposed tax is an EXTRA tax on billionaires only. The “all taxation is theft” position is pretty indefensible in modern society, but this explicit “No, fuck you in particular!” tax is ALSO indefensible.
That is a hole we could fix tomorrow by eliminating the step up on death. No need to introduce a new global financial surveillance regime for tracking asset ownership for wealth tax purposes just to fix that.
Fuck billionaires. The fact that individual people possess so much wealth is poisonous to society. It is the easiest thing in the world for a billionaire to become a not-billionaire and they will still be stupendously wealthy.
Your reasoning is ignoring that billionaires disproportionately benefit from public investments (tax money). Therefore, when they avoid paying taxes, they're taking more from the community than they are putting back in: this is theft, and degrades society for everyone (even billionaires, in the long run).
Better neighbor analogy: your neighbor asks for small favors all the time, and you provide. One day you ask him for one and he leaves the neighborhood entirely instead of obliging.
> billionaires became as such without utilizing any resources or regulations paid for by the public
Strawman.
No one is claiming "without utilizing".
However, they are part of the public that paid. Moreover, if I let you use my pen to take a note, I'm not entitled to all of the gain that you get from taking said note.
If I make a dollar and you make 10 selling apples on a road paid for by the public why shouldn’t you be held any more responsible for the upkeep of that road?
Could you please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle? Your account has been doing this a ton lately, and it's a line at which we ban accounts. I don't want to ban you but we need you to use the site as intended. A certain percentage of political posts is ok but it should be nowhere near 50, let alone 90.
And if SpaceX was not there, who would the government turn to? Fun fact: the US is way ahead of China in space launches, but if you remove SpaceX, then China is way ahead of the US.
Opinions like this are why the smart and wealthy people succeed in politics, while others are encouraged to lay asphalt if they want healthcare.
Red tape and regulation has second-order effects, many of which keep you employed. By all means, you should leave America if you have any hope for a nation that eschews regulation in it's entirety. You should stay if you want to get paid to build roads, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
I've never really understood the knee-jerk hatred toward billionaires. The reality is that while I'm sure some fraud/corruption exists, for the most part, they cannot steal money from you. They have to make something so good, a person chooses to part with their money to acquire it.
The government on the other hand, can just tax you (often without cause or justification) and offer nothing in return for what they took by force.
Yet you'll find many people decrying billionaires as the great evil while silent on governments who are in many ways, far far worse.
It's more about the concentrated power that billionaires (shouldn't) have. I didn't care that Elon Musk had $100b+ until he started using it to buy social media platforms and influence national politics.
Of course, you were concerned about how the folks who previously ran Twitter used it to influence national politics, right? You're concerned about such influence by the folks who run each of the four major networks, the folks who run the major newspapers, etc.
What is this concentrated power you speak about? In many areas, they have exactly the same power as everyone else. They get only one vote each election day. They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else.
Now you're right that they have more money and they can spend it. Some things like hiring a lawyer to sue someone are too expensive for an average person but accessible to billionaires. Rich people can do things with taxes loopholes that aren't practical for the average schmoe.
It is true that they often have power at their company and sometimes they use it overtly or covertly. But even this can be limited because they have to work with partners and other shareholders. The CEO of a big publicly traded company can't just break the rules because they're on a power trip.
> They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else
Don't be obtuse. The people we're talking about don't go to the Post office, or the grocery store, and they certainly don't queue up. They don't even queue up at the airport, they have private planes, private security, private everything.
And "they only get one vote each election day". Voting is the least amount of political influence that a person can have.
Actually, you're the one being obtuse. The point isn't that they use Instacart to avoid the lines. The point is that everyone can use Instacart or the USPS mobile app and everyone pretty much pays the same price. The point is that there's no special level of power that's available only to people with a billion dollars.
There's this mythology built around great wealth and it's largely false. They can't just snap their fingers and make things happen as if by magic. There's no special magic power that only they get. They have to pay for what they want and just like normal humans, they can only spend the money once.
I don't know how you can't see it, but people who have gobs of wealth absolutely have more options (and more powerful options) than people who don't. For just one small example, they can purchase equity in non-public companies. If a regular person wanted to invest in OpenAI, they couldn't. But if a billionaire wants to throw down $10b, they can.
Just like how someone who has $200k can get a mortgage to buy a house, whereas someone with only $20k cannot. That's economic power that comes from having wealth to leverage.
Sensationalist garbage. Actual studies have found that the loss in revenue is minimal, and that current wealth taxes are well below what they should be for maximum benefit:
> We show that trickle-down effects do exist, but that they are quantitatively small. A one percentage point increase in the top wealth tax rate decreases aggregate employment by 0.02%, aggregate investment by 0.07%, and aggregate value-added by 0.10% in the long run. Importantly, these effects are modest despite the fact that top wealth holders—many of whom are entrepreneurs—account for a large share of economic activity in Scandinavia through the businesses they control. Our approach to estimating trickle-down effects is arguably the most innovative part of our paper. It is based on clear identification assumptions and is statistically precise.
> The modest economic effects of tax-induced migration do not necessarily imply that wealth taxation is an optimal policy. To evaluate wealth taxation, we also have to account for their effects along the intensive margin, operating through changes in savings, investments, avoidance, and evasion. Jakobsen, Jakobsen, Kleven and Zucman (2020) find sizable intensive margin effects of wealth tax reform in Denmark. Combining the migration estimates presented here with their intensive margin estimates, we show that the Scandinavian wealth taxes were below the Laffer point and that their Marginal Cost of Public Funds (MCPF) was about 4.2.54 Leaving aside equity arguments, taxing top wealth would be welfare-improving if the revenue raised is spent on projects with a Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) greater than 4.2. Comparing MVPFs across a range of policies, Hendren and Sprung-Keyser (2020) argue that programs targeted to low-income children have the highest MVPFs, often greater than 5. This suggests that funding projects for low-income children via progressive wealth taxation has the potential to increase social welfare.
When academia has purged most Republicans, science can no longer be done. The point is to disprove hypotheses, nowadays academics ignore science and just twist data to show what they want.
Republicans scream at scientists and try to get them fired for doing climate science research, destroy funding bodies, pass legislation saying what professors can and cannot teach in class, and generally call the entire academic ecosystem a bunch of groomers. Fewer republicans choose to go to graduate school and become professors. This, somehow, means that research can never be done, justifying further destruction of academia.
I'm very sorry but I don't understand how not having a dozen race science people teaching about brain pans down the hall means my research is bunk.
Good riddance, I say. All these selfish pricks can take their "wealth" to Mars where they can be completely self-reliant and don't have to help anyone like they were helped.
Except if you buy, borrow, and die you don't pay taxes.
Elon Musk only paid taxes because he had stock options that were going to expire. Otherwise he just doesn't sell shares thus not triggering a taxable event and not paying taxes.
Massive numbers of jobs as billionaires by definition are building highly successful large companies. Being on the cutting edge of science and technology. Improvements to all of our lives from better goods and services.
If you hate billionaires, then stop buying any goods off Amazon or from any other billionaire owned company. My guess is your quality of life will drop precipitously.
I don't hate billionaires. They just shouldn't have that much money. NO ONE should have that much money. In fact, back in the 80s, virtually no one did. Remember when Bill Gates was the richest person in the world in 1995? And he had $13b of MSFT stock. Now the 10 richest people all have 10-20x that. That's not inflation (which is only 3x since then), that's an incredible increase of wealth concentrated in their hands, that gives them the power to light our industrial society on fire if they want. And some of them do want.
Right, so a sensible society would tax capital gains more than labor, but since we didn't do that, the lion's share went to the already wealthy. For no reason other than being wealthy.
California should tax its' most valuable asset, its land. It's immovable.
Of course, they did the exact opposite with prop 13 many decades ago, creating a land owning class with disproportionately low tax rates.
In California, if you make or do something valuable, you have to pay increasing proportions of the rewards to the government. But the longer you (and your ancestors) simply own land and do nothing, the lower your tax rate.
Have there been proposals to tax secondary properties, or is it just easy to evade those, or is the electorate just way too anti property tax. It does feel a far more sustained source of taxation revenue that a one time tax on select individuals.
