This plan is so very soft on the billionaires and yet we are going to see it being resisted violently and with extreme prejudice.
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By temporarily embarrassed millionaires, no less.
Even most of the extremely rich aren't effected by this, if you calculate it out you need over 31,000,000 dollars before the lowest bracket kicks in.
Uh my house will totally be worth that much so I hate this!
/S
Pretty sure thats the point.
Showing that the billionaires will react to practically nothing like it will destroy them. And hopefully maybe a few more people will realize they're full of shit
Keep in mind it's a wealth tax, not an income tax, so these numbers hit way harder than the income tax ones you're used to.
Yes, percent should be about 10x what has been recommended.
For everyone saying this is not harsh enough, it is a WEALTH tax. Not income, wealth. All owned assets. Meaning any of these people who don't increase their net worth by at least the amount of the tax each year will lose more and more of their total wealth year over year.
It isn't intended to strip all mega rich people of all their stuff immediately - that obviously could never pass - but still is intended to open the door to wealth taxes and redistributive policies more broadly.
It's a great move. If we can get anything like this passed, it is a significant victory.
Just getting something like this out of committee and on the floor for debate would be huge. Unfortunately it stands no chance with the current congress
In other news, renting a house has never been more popular! On secondary news, rent has raised across america by 8% unilaterally
Are you describing right now or making a prediction I can't tell
I think it is more the state of American media. Similarly to before 08 housing crash, many home builders got stuck with over valued houses no one would buy. So they rented them out so that it would generate income and not have to take a write down. If you watch CNBC it tells you how the housing market is somehow doing amazing if you look at perfectly curated numbers that do not add up. One of the common media pieces at the moment is how popular this new rental home trend is and how its so helpful and gracious to those who can’t afford homes. Example: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/14/homes/build-for-rent-homes/index.html
I really love the floating design of the tax pegged to household income, but I'd probably oppose it due to exactly what you say: it opens the door to wealth taxes, which are by and large a bad idea.
We've proven time and time again that congress can't properly tax the wealthy, and will always eventually default to squeezing revenue out of the middle class. 50 million as a minimum sounds nice and high until they add a bracket at 25 million, then 10, then before you know it there's a non-inflation adjusted tax at 1 million or 500k. All that serves to do is hurt savers and the elderly (who will naturally have higher nest eggs being closer to retirement). This will 100% eventually come to pass, because taxing wealth is a further nudge towards a consumption (and therefore growth) based economy that publicly traded companies need to continue extracting wealth from consumers, so it will be lobbied for by all monied interests, both the rich and industry.
There are tons of other issues with a wealth tax like creating a new bureaucracy to measure wealth (not impossible, as some people say, just expensive), the fact that people are taxed for gains they may not have realized or just for leaving money in the bank or stock market, something that is actually good for the economy, and other complaints. It's also just inferior to a better income tax, and expanding income taxes to eliminate the loopholes the megarich use, chief among them borrowing against collateralized debt. If someone gets a loan but puts up stock or properties as collateral, that loan should count as income. There are tons of other loopholes, and the fact that we're ignoring low-hanging fruit and talking about wealth taxes shows me this is about scoring political points, not actually trying to reform how our government gets money.
Eight whole percent. I can hear their boots shaking now /s
Go with the Bernie plan. Anything over $1B is taxed at 100%. Shit, I think even that is too soft. Nobody needs even a fraction of that to for themselves and their children's children's children's ... to live like kings their entire lives.
Also, it's always hilarious how American politicians are so obsessed with overly on-the-nose acronyms for legislation.
It's got a snowballs chance in hell of going anywhere, but it's nigh time a wealth tax entered the realm of possibility
Yeah, we have a better chance of pigs flying, getting struck by lightning, and winning the lottery all at the same time on the same day simultaneously than this has of actually passing both chambers and getting signed into an actual law. This type of thing will never pass when the very oligarchs it seeks to tax own the very government responsible for making it a law.
What a travesty. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of the brows of everyone he's screwed over to amass his fortune? Sure, I might not have two cents to rub together between paychecks but I'd better oppose this just in case I get rich some day.
That's it? The highest one is 8%? Wtf is this, a joke? No one needs billions of dollars. No one should hoard billions while others sleep in the streets. Hell, billionaires shouldn't exist at all.
Edit: also where is the "assets" and stocks tax?
8% seems fine considering it's a wealth tax, not an income tax. In 7 years that takes away 56% of their wealth.
Granted, I'm not at all clear on what sort of assets constitute "wealth" here. How much of Musk's $242.4 billion net worth that google currently spits out would be affected by this?
It's not like their wealth is not increasing. Fuck them, I wish I could tax them 90% after their first billion. No one needs one thousand million dollars. Holy shit! It's a lot of money they'll never ever spend. Also, I'd tax everything they own, even their stocks and other "assets" they use to avade taxes.
8% is a good figure. 8% gets real change and it gets it fast. This rhetoric helps nothing. Wealth taxes are very different from income taxes.
It’s so soft and yet there is still 0% chance of this going anywhere. That’s where we are smh.
Yup. I've literally given up hope on this government. At this point, I'm just waiting for a total collapse of this country. It will happen, but I don't know when.
Sounds like where I'm at. The Paranoia Agent OP just keeps getting louder and louder in my head with every passing year.
Paranoia Agent...now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
I don't think that report took into account the effect of feedback loops. I give it like ten, at the rosiest.
Why the fuck do I pay like 30% percent on my income? Fuck the IRS. Go after every single last billionaire tax dodger or stop taxing in general.
Wealth taxes are much different than income taxes, and as such have a lower percentage.
I actually agree with you. There should not be tax on labor. I'm already helping society with my labor, why would you double down on me?
Wealth taxes are super easy to avoid, so I'd much rather see something like cap gains+"luxury" sales/income taxes and such, but it's a step in the right direction
Now raise taxes on everyone making over 100k and we're really cooking with gas
$100k aint that much and those people already have a heafty tax burden. Plus luxury taxes are easily avoided when yachts and planes are purchased in the Bahamas. What we need are 50% taxes on the money they borrow against their assets. Want to buy another mansion? Cool 50% tax on the money Goldman Sachs lends you against your Amazon stock. If I have to pay a tax to borrow against my 401k so should these assholes.
But income tax on paper is already higher for the $100k tax bracket than what the ultra rich pay. The ultra rich do everything in their power to not have an "income". Hence why there's this effort of taxing wealth instead.
You should check out cap gains taxes
The cap gains tax that the richest people in the world never end up paying?
From 2014-2018 Warren Buffet alone grew his personal wealth by 24.3B, reported 125M in income (0.51% of wealth), and paid 23.7M in taxes (0.1% of wealth). Over 4 years, this man paid taxes on a tenth of a percent of his income. Similar tax numbers under 5% apply for other billionaires.
The ultra rich never pay capital gains tax, loopholes allow them to have their income in portfolios, which isn't taxed. Capital gains is only for realized gains. When your portfolio is worth billions, you don't need to sell it to have spending money, you can take a loan against the value of portfolio.
Capital gains tax only affects those who don't have a bank's worth of money in their portfolio.
My post was specifically that we should increase amount paid via cap gains so I'm not sure where you're going here
These are laws we've written, not magic. We can change them
Edit: also wealth taxes, historically, are among the easiest to avoid via accounting, and the hardest to "fix" as laws
The Supreme Court would veto it as unconstitutional even if passed. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/12/17/787476334/is-a-wealth-tax-constitutional
"Veto" isn't the correct term, but you are otherwise entirely correct.
Isn't the issue that they are currently hiding and obfuscating their income? Increasing the percentage is a great idea and all but 1% or 8% of zero is still zero.
It literally says "all wealth" and doesn't talk about income at all.
This is exactly the kind of tax we need. I think its a very interesting idea to tie it to median wealth, though using household as opposed to individual wealth I'm not sold on.
The legislation would also require at least a 30% IRS audit rate on households affected by the new wealth tax, according to the summary.
Good thing the people who have to vote on it aren't impacted by these brackets at all!