6 ms·

There is a method for dealing with widespread inequality coinciding with generational wealth transfer, it’s called taxation. Tax transfers of wealth. It’s not c

by kpmcc 11mo ago

There is a method for dealing with widespread inequality coinciding with generational wealth transfer, it’s called taxation. Tax transfers of wealth. It’s not complicated and doesn’t rely on the goodwill of ‘values-driven, digitally native, and community oriented’ young people. We have a system designed to incentivize greed. Gross inequality is the result. Taxation is one viable method to deal with such a failure mode.

throwaway48476 11mo ago
Wage suppression has had a far bigger impact. Governments have lots of policies to prevent the 'wage price spiral' because they don't want the real dollar term asset distribution to change.
mvdwoord 11mo ago
It's a method, for sure, but not a fail-safe one nor the only one. There seems to be an active experiment going on in the UK right now.
- bargainbin 11mo ago
  Care to elaborate a bit on the UK comment, because it’s not clear what you mean or if you even live here? The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax. All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me. The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.
  - aydyn 11mo ago
    How can you be poorer than people earning less than you? Thats not how progressive tax works. Am I misunderstanding something or is UK that messed up or something?
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - mvdwoord 11mo ago
      Not how progressive tax works, but it is the reality, e.g. in The Netherlands. Once you go over certain thresholds, you lose certain benefits leading to a poverty trap in some sense where the incentives of the system do not align with the implied goals of a healthy economy.
      - StackRanker3000 11mo ago
        Yes, it’s similar in the UK. If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60% That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000 So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead
  - mvdwoord 11mo ago
    I do not live in the UK, but across the channel.. Had to look it up a bit as I do not follow this in great detail but there is some significant debate there on inheritance taxes I believe? I appreciate that this is a complex topic, but the point I tried to make in response was that these things are rarely as simple as people make them out to be. Increasing taxes on wealth transfers could have all sorts of side effects which are not easy to link as nothing in the economy happens in isolation. I thought the UK was perhaps a relevant example, as France and Sweden have been recently as well. The economy is not a zero sum game, and the rich can get richer while the poor get richer as well. Maybe this is not a fair representation of what is going on, and I am certainly no expert on the US economy, but the whole "just tax the rich" mantra does not seem obviously true or effective to me. I agree though that the system as a whole feels broken.. but also, because it is "small club, and we ain't in it". Wealth has a significant influence on policy...
    - rsynnott 11mo ago
      That was blown out of all proportion, tbh; the UK used to have a tax carveout for the upper-middle-class which allows unused pension funds to be inherited tax-free, and this was in practice used as a tax avoidance mechanism, and that's going away, but it really isn't a particularly big deal in the scheme of things. (Or there was another change to the privileged treatment of farms and family businesses, but again, you're not talking about a huge change.)
greffel 11mo ago
[flagged]
aborsy 11mo ago
This method has problems too. There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience, overall is not doing well.
- lenkite 11mo ago
  > There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience, Are there really more beggars and homeless in the EU compared to the US ? Admittedly, my anecdotal viewpoint is only that of a visitor, but having been to both, it seemed US cities had a far more severe problem. The first time it was a bit of a shock to me - the US had this patina of glory that crumbled for me after my first visit.
  - rsynnott 11mo ago
    There's a question of what 'homelessness' means, there. So to take an example, Dublin counts 11,000 people as homeless, with ~120 sleeping rough. SF, a somewhat bigger city, but in the same size range, counts 8,000 people homeless... but with over 4000 sleeping rough. This is both a difference in temporary/emergency accommodation available, and a difference in definition (for instance I don't think SF counts couch surfing as homeless).
- neuronic 11mo ago
  Uh yea, thats because we tax everyone to hell EXCEPT the rich. Wealth inequality is a serious problem and we are moving to catastrophe sooner rather than later on the current path. It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
  - aborsy 11mo ago
    * Wealth inequality in US is clearly a big problem. But it’s typically not a big problem in the rest of the world, certainly in EU. * If you think taxes and donations will solve the problem with people who struggle with basics, you are wrong. Again look at the world, places like France.
drittel 11mo ago
[flagged]
- rimbo789 11mo ago
  If the “victim” is a large corporation is almost certainly does
  - drittel 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - bdbdkdksk 11mo ago
      I bet you like the state using force to protect your stuff though, right? If someone scary sets up a tent on your front lawn because they have nowhere to live I bet you're all about using government services to enact violence.
      - ThunderSizzle 11mo ago
        Most high tax states and areas don't help individual landowners with problems like that, ironically enough.
      - cindyllm 11mo ago
        [dead]
      - 36280132928226 11mo ago
        [flagged]
    - rimbo789 11mo ago
      Inheritance tax should be 100%; taxation isn’t theft, excess riches are. State thugs are much less a threat than private ones. The difference between organized crime and large corporations is just branding.
- fabian2k 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
imtringued 11mo ago
The economy has the equivalent of a permanent memory leak. The Austrians decided to restrict the amount of memory (money). The economy crashed like a program running out of memory. Keynes said, let the memory leak and just get more memory. This works until it doesn't, which is still a bigger win than losing multiple times. Meanwhile Gesell said, if you want finite memory, then you must penalize memory consumption. The amount of memory that an economy needs depends on the total number of transactions (total throughput) and how fast each processor is (sequential throughout). Many slow processes means you need more processes in parallel, which means you need more memory. Curiously, transactions are taxed by the government. This means that taxation minimisation implies delaying and minimizing transactions. There is an inherent bias towards being slow. It seems like tax policy is completely backwards in most countries.
mmooss 11mo ago
It's almost like crowd-sourcing, while being more consistent, democratic and fair. As long as we're discussing it on this level, why tax transfers of wealth instead of wealth itself?

by kpmcc 11mo ago

throwaway48476 11mo ago

Wage suppression has had a far bigger impact. Governments have lots of policies to prevent the 'wage price spiral' because they don't want the real dollar term asset distribution to change.

mvdwoord 11mo ago

It's a method, for sure, but not a fail-safe one nor the only one. There seems to be an active experiment going on in the UK right now.

bargainbin 11mo ago
Care to elaborate a bit on the UK comment, because it’s not clear what you mean or if you even live here? The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax. All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me. The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.
- aydyn 11mo ago
  How can you be poorer than people earning less than you? Thats not how progressive tax works. Am I misunderstanding something or is UK that messed up or something?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mvdwoord 11mo ago
    Not how progressive tax works, but it is the reality, e.g. in The Netherlands. Once you go over certain thresholds, you lose certain benefits leading to a poverty trap in some sense where the incentives of the system do not align with the implied goals of a healthy economy.
    - StackRanker3000 11mo ago
      Yes, it’s similar in the UK. If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60% That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000 So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead
- mvdwoord 11mo ago
  I do not live in the UK, but across the channel.. Had to look it up a bit as I do not follow this in great detail but there is some significant debate there on inheritance taxes I believe? I appreciate that this is a complex topic, but the point I tried to make in response was that these things are rarely as simple as people make them out to be. Increasing taxes on wealth transfers could have all sorts of side effects which are not easy to link as nothing in the economy happens in isolation. I thought the UK was perhaps a relevant example, as France and Sweden have been recently as well. The economy is not a zero sum game, and the rich can get richer while the poor get richer as well. Maybe this is not a fair representation of what is going on, and I am certainly no expert on the US economy, but the whole "just tax the rich" mantra does not seem obviously true or effective to me. I agree though that the system as a whole feels broken.. but also, because it is "small club, and we ain't in it". Wealth has a significant influence on policy...
  - rsynnott 11mo ago
    That was blown out of all proportion, tbh; the UK used to have a tax carveout for the upper-middle-class which allows unused pension funds to be inherited tax-free, and this was in practice used as a tax avoidance mechanism, and that's going away, but it really isn't a particularly big deal in the scheme of things. (Or there was another change to the privileged treatment of farms and family businesses, but again, you're not talking about a huge change.)

greffel 11mo ago

[flagged]

aborsy 11mo ago

This method has problems too. There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience, overall is not doing well.

lenkite 11mo ago
> There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience, Are there really more beggars and homeless in the EU compared to the US ? Admittedly, my anecdotal viewpoint is only that of a visitor, but having been to both, it seemed US cities had a far more severe problem. The first time it was a bit of a shock to me - the US had this patina of glory that crumbled for me after my first visit.
- rsynnott 11mo ago
  There's a question of what 'homelessness' means, there. So to take an example, Dublin counts 11,000 people as homeless, with ~120 sleeping rough. SF, a somewhat bigger city, but in the same size range, counts 8,000 people homeless... but with over 4000 sleeping rough. This is both a difference in temporary/emergency accommodation available, and a difference in definition (for instance I don't think SF counts couch surfing as homeless).
neuronic 11mo ago
Uh yea, thats because we tax everyone to hell EXCEPT the rich. Wealth inequality is a serious problem and we are moving to catastrophe sooner rather than later on the current path. It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
- aborsy 11mo ago
  * Wealth inequality in US is clearly a big problem. But it’s typically not a big problem in the rest of the world, certainly in EU. * If you think taxes and donations will solve the problem with people who struggle with basics, you are wrong. Again look at the world, places like France.

drittel 11mo ago

[flagged]

rimbo789 11mo ago
If the “victim” is a large corporation is almost certainly does
- drittel 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - bdbdkdksk 11mo ago
    I bet you like the state using force to protect your stuff though, right? If someone scary sets up a tent on your front lawn because they have nowhere to live I bet you're all about using government services to enact violence.
    - ThunderSizzle 11mo ago
      Most high tax states and areas don't help individual landowners with problems like that, ironically enough.
    - cindyllm 11mo ago
      [dead]
    - 36280132928226 11mo ago
      [flagged]
  - rimbo789 11mo ago
    Inheritance tax should be 100%; taxation isn’t theft, excess riches are. State thugs are much less a threat than private ones. The difference between organized crime and large corporations is just branding.
fabian2k 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

imtringued 11mo ago

The economy has the equivalent of a permanent memory leak. The Austrians decided to restrict the amount of memory (money). The economy crashed like a program running out of memory. Keynes said, let the memory leak and just get more memory. This works until it doesn't, which is still a bigger win than losing multiple times. Meanwhile Gesell said, if you want finite memory, then you must penalize memory consumption. The amount of memory that an economy needs depends on the total number of transactions (total throughput) and how fast each processor is (sequential throughout). Many slow processes means you need more processes in parallel, which means you need more memory. Curiously, transactions are taxed by the government. This means that taxation minimisation implies delaying and minimizing transactions. There is an inherent bias towards being slow. It seems like tax policy is completely backwards in most countries.

mmooss 11mo ago

It's almost like crowd-sourcing, while being more consistent, democratic and fair. As long as we're discussing it on this level, why tax transfers of wealth instead of wealth itself?