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.
