There's nothing unethical about a wealth tax. Billionaires made their fortunates on the backs of society and have only maintained that power and wealth through corruption and bribery. They should have never had that money to begin with.
Wealth taxes are the equivalent of stealing from somebody just because you know you can get away with it. They are morally wrong even if they are beneficial to you personally.
I think that the problem with wealth tax is that a person's wealth is none of your business. It is immoral to think you have the right to someone else's property. Just because you vote to take away people's property does mean it isn't theft and doesn't mean you're any better than a petty envious cretin. People should have the right to make as much money as they like through voluntary transactions that ultimately benefit both parties. And they should be allowed to leave as much of that money to their descendants and they wish. This should be none of your business. You people are evil!
Sorry but a wealth tax is simply morally unacceptable. I don’t think it is appropriate at all to have worked hard, made choices, committed time/stress/etc, earned wealth, paid all taxes along the way, only to have it confiscated after the fact, in effect as an undisclosed but retroactive penalty. What does ownership and private property mean in such a system? Wealth taxes more closely resemble theft than a typical tax, and it erodes fundamental rights in our society.
A wealth tax wouldn't change that. No billionaire is going to sit around and watch his $1B fortune be whittled away in 5 years by a 20% tax. Instead he's going to divest -- he'll put the money into other companies or charitable foundations.
A wealth tax would be nice, instead of income or expenses taxation. Tax those who hoard. If a billionaire is spending $800m on things, he's doing a lot of good for the economy, probably more than taxing him $10m would.
Wealth taxes are unfair for the middle class they inevitably end up hitting. Multi billionaires being taxed on their wealth is not really unfair but they never really end up paying those taxes as they have access to legal tax avoidance loopholes so it's always the well off middle class that ends up footing the tax bill.
Wealth taxes should be dependent on what you do with your wealth. Is your wealth creating jobs, start-ups, education, research and innovation that benefit society and the environment? How about no wealth taxes for you. Is your wealth just sitting in hoarded land and real estate, looking to appreciate or for rent seeking opportunities? How about pay up or go fuck yourself.
This kind of naive wealth tax has all kinds of unwanted sideffects and bureaucracy monsters that come with it. Especially if you imagine holding non public stock and estate, this quickly becomes absurd. To reach the original goals of a wealth tax it makes much more sense to:
- Prevent inheritance to an agreed maximum (the dead does not care and the children basically should not complain to get a capped inheritance. 1 million or 10 or whatever society agrees to be max is still not equal opportunity but closer, family owned paintings and jewlery etc. Can be lended and bought back from the state
- tax luxury purchases by 50% to 100%, this is really what we want: a buddhist billionaire who spends nothing is not bothered by the tax office until after death and an asshole who buys a yacht, gulfstream and rolex is forced to give back to society in significant amounts
- make luxury tax apply for moving whealth outside of the country imediately
Instead, we need to have a wealth cap. No one in the world needs to have more than 10 million dollars in total wealth. Not just a 100% tax on income over that amount; I mean a 100% tax on appraised wealth over that amount.
The additional tax revenue is divided by the country's population size as a small, baseline income to every citizen. Everyone gets a small income.
The main reason for doing this isn't to punish the rich; no one can cry at having 10 million, inflation-adjusted. It's to deflate power. In 2007, the top 1% had 43% of the financial wealth; the next 4%, 29%. The bottom 80%, 8%.
The very concept of the billionaire is hedonistic and greedy. No one needs or deserves to have so much when others have so little. It's a bug in the system; a flaw in the design.
If you have a race and someone is 300 meters ahead of you, you can say, "Wow, great! That person must have trained hard and have a lot of talent." If someone is 40 kilometers ahead, you can say, "Wait, who took a taxi?" Some distance can be assigned to effort, skill and luck. But past that, it's indicative of a flaw in the system or a crime. Let's change that. It's time.
The real problem though isn't wealth inequality, it's income inequality. If someone has a billion dollars that's invested in various stocks, and never tries to withdraw that money, leave him alone. The day he decides to sell his investments and start buying private jets, that's the time to tax him on his income.
The argument against a wealth tax, is that it penalizes savers, and rewards spenders. Which is not what we want as a society. It's better for both the individual and for society if people invested their money into productive enterprises, instead of spending it on luxury goods.
If the goal is to provide a more egalitarian quality of life across society, this can be perfectly achieved through an income tax alone. Specifically, by treating capital gains the same way as salaries, and by increasing the marginal tax rates for high earners.
The entire point of the article is about taxing the wealth of extremely rich people rather than income because the wealth is structured to not generate taxable income.
I think there are two considerations here: (1) fairness, (2) good economic policy.
It's certainly not fair to have such a large proportion of power concentrated in such a minuscule number of people.
It's hard to see how it's a good economic policy either. We want there to be capital available to be invested in further economic activities (I think we do, anyway; there are people who would debate that). But we don't want -- and certainly don't need -- so much of it in so few hands. A wealth tax is a way to drain some of that away.
A tax on wealth is heinous, and in the long run won't work. First of all, how do you define wealth? An average over the year, end of year, middle of year? Who defines it? Part of the problem is wealth doesn't really mean anything. You can claim something is with X but until you actually sell it, it really isn't worth anything.
The other issue is, I could work hard, build a company up, make the same income as the previous year, but now my wealth had increased because my company increased. So I gave to pay more taxes?
Or I own some collectible that goes up in value, and I have to pay more taxes just because someone out there wants what I have?
No, a wealth tax is criminal.
I will NEVER vote for a wealth tax. It will inevitably be abused, loopholed, and twisted by the most powerful to preserve the status quo, and it will be the middle and working classes that get screwed by it. The income tax was originally passed as an emergency temporary measure only levied on the top percentages of earners, and over the years it has been contorted to become an enormous extraction of middle class purchasing power while the rich use loopholes like 1 dollar salaries. If a wealth tax is passed then I am absolutely certain that the same thing would happen, and the middle class would get screwed even more. It's human nature.
And besides, it's freaking Davos that's calling for this... this is just PR. Catharsis.
Suddenly 99% of the world is no longer discouraged from being fiscally responsible. Do I really care if a billionaire is fiscally irresponsible? Maybe for a single generation. After that, we're good.
Well, we can create a wealth tax that doesn't have that problem. I'd wager there aren't many billionaires who actually are primarily invested in illiquid assets. I'd say the larger objection is the principle that we shouldn't be multiply taxing people. A wealth tax basically means re-taxing the same wealth every year.
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