Broke-ass Republican Dumbfucks hate the “wealth tax” because….reasons
Mike Konczal at The Nation writes—A wealth tax is one of the most progressive government levies, falling entirely on the extremely wealthy.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed wealth taxes, with Warren’s taxing 2 percent of wealth for those worth over $50 million and 3 percent after the first $1 billion. Sanders’s plan would levy a 1 percent tax on households worth more than $32 million, with higher tax rates for the wealthiest—up to 8 percent for those with fortunes in excess of $10 billion.
Researched and defended by economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, a wealth tax is one of the most progressive government levies available to us, falling entirely on the extremely wealthy. It would help with some of the evasion problems: Efforts to hide income as wealth would be rendered futile, as that fortune would be taxed anyway.
Experts are addressing objections to the wealth tax. There is a question of how to value wealth so it can be taxed and whether people would be liquid enough to pay these taxes. Fortunately, much wealth is in stocks and bonds, which are easily calculated. And the IRS can develop new evaluation techniques for other financial assets. Sanders and Warren want to increase the agency’s enforcement budget. Under Sanders’s plan, billionaires would be audited every year. And the liquidity issue of having the cash on hand to pay can be addressed by allowing limited deferrals with interest. Unlike many countries, the United States collects taxes from citizens overseas. It also has a wealth penalty it charges people who renounce their citizenship to avoid taxes, as some fear might happen if a wealth tax is implemented. Warren’s plan, for instance, would impose a 40 percent exit tax on Americans worth more than $50 million who give up their citizenship.
It is worth noting what kind of public program expansion could happen with this kind of revenue growth. Saez and Zucman said that a proposal like Warren’s would raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years and that Sanders’s could raise $4.35 trillion over the same period.
Not a cheerleader for wealth tax. I want to soak the rich as much as anybody, but there’s a right way and a wrong way. Wealth tax is like using liposuction to keep your body healthy while you continue your gluttonous behaviors. Better to eliminate the gluttonous behaviors.
I could get behind some kind of wealth tax as a temporary surcharge, but not as a structural part of the economy.
The ultra rich don’t work; instead they derive income from various forms of parasitic economic activity. The American economic system has developed many funnels to transfer torrents of money upward. Each one of those funnels should be shut down one by one.
I like the idea of a micro-tax on every securities transaction. And whatever happened to closing the carried-interest loophole? I don’t hear anyone talking about that anymore.
I also like the idea of low corporate taxes. Why shouldn’t our corporations do well? But whenever executives transfer enormous sums to themselves and their investors and it becomes personal income, tax the hell out of it.
Corporate taxes should be lowered by legitimate investments in the business, not by accounting tricks and shuffling money around.
Yes. These also:
micro-tax on every securities transaction and closing the carried-interest loophole.
The Constitution, Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 4: “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.”
Sixteenth Amendment: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
The Sixteenth Amendment allows the federal government to place taxes on income, without regard to proportion by population, but every other direct tax on individuals is subject to that limitation. A direct federal tax on wealth would not meet the exception granted by the Sixteenth Amendment.
The Supreme Court ruled in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. 157 US 249 (1895) that an income tax was unconstitutional in that it was not based on population. That was the impetus for the Sixteenth Amendment, but that Amendment specified only incomes.
Yes but….
What’s income? The definition of income is well within the power of Congress. Congress could simply define income as an return on investment of time, labor, capital, or other good. Most people invest their time and labor for which they receive remuneration that the government defines as income. There is nothing prohibiting expanding that defintion to include other investments. Perhaps folks like day traders and merger brokers would be willing to pay on their returns, including things like carried interest charges. Actually, such a program would be very simple to implement.
“What’s income?”
That too. What a broke-ass fucking dipshit dickwad to be sticking up for people who have locked up more wealth than the Pharaohs because he thinks he is on thier team. Fucking absurd.
We pretty much do tax income in all of its forms. It’s not just wages, but dividends, capital gains, interest income, rental and royalties. And while wealth may generate income, which is taxed, wealth itself already exists, and is not federally taxed. Many localities do tax wealth, in the form of property taxes, but the feds can’t do that.
Tell me, what does the Constitution say about the powers of the Supreme Court? Please highlight the portion that says the court will decide whether or not laws are Constitutional.
My point being that the Constitution has always been imperfectly followed, because it was imperfectly written, mainly because there was no template to follow. Whenever someone makes an argument like yours, the question actually is, “What do you have against the issue?” Because people usually rely on the Constitutional argument when they don’t have one that persuades people on a common-sense level. Citing such provisions dodges the question of what you think is right. And people usually do that when they have no persuasive leg to stand on.
^^^^^
Marbury v Madison is unconstitutional! Eliminate judicial review!
Mrs Warren’s proposal, even if she does win the election, will go nowhere. It would require a constitutional amendment to allow the federal government to tax existing wealth without regard to population, and such an amendment will never pass. Mrs Warren’s proposal is meant to garner her votes, but it’s so unserious a proposal, which she very well knows, that it is simply a lie.
What do I think is right? Given that wealth is, in effect, the accumulation of property through income which has already been taxed, it should be beyond taxation. I despise the notion of property taxes at all levels, because it abuses the concept of ownership.
It’s not so much of an issue in the Bluegrass State, where property taxes are low, but it certainly was contentious in Pennsylvania when I lived there. People who had worked all their lives to buy their homes were being socked with thousands of dollars a year in property taxes, even in retirement.
KY has a sales tax. That’s a tax on money that’s been taxed before.
Anyway, this is all boilerplate libertarian lunatic logic you’ve been taught to perform publically like a well-trained circus animal.
Yes, Kentucky, like most states, has a sales tax. We also have a state income tax, one at 5% is higher than the 3.2% I paid in the Keystone State. What Kentucky doesn’t do is nickel-and-dime people to death the way Pennsylvania does, through toll roads, the second highest gasoline tax in the nation, and fees on virtually everything.
It’s obvious that states do have to have taxes; it seems to me that Kentucky’s way of doing things works better.
In Delaware, y’all don’t have a sales tax, but the business gross receipts tax does about the same thing.
Surely by now, Mr Vanella, you’ve learned that insults like that simply roll off my back. I expect them here, so they don’t bother me. My question is: whom do you believe you are persuading with them?
It’s not so much an insult as it is a dismissal of your attitude. You are no Constitutional scholar, though the people you learned this from might be. But surely you must understand that your limited knowledge of the Constitution isn’t really germane to the issue at hand, because, though your sachems don’t acknowledge it, the Constitution is malleable.
When enough Democrats are elected, a wealth tax will be enacted, just as when enough Republicans were elected, money became speech.
Until then, your pontifications are more worthless than you think. Try reading the link Jason provided. The authors are experts. Are you?
It would also behoove you to remember the words of John K. Galbreath: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
you’re so brave to keep showing up and standing up for your beliefs in the face of such VICIOUS and HORRID persecution.
“People who had worked all their lives to buy their homes [in Pennsylvania] were being socked with thousands of dollars a year in property taxes, even in retirement.”
And other people move from low-property-tax Delaware into Pennsylvania to put their kids in the better schools funded by PA local property taxes.
I lived in Pennsylvania for the first 17 years of my life. Of all the reasons to leave, high property taxes were very far down the list.
Kentucky has a higher state income tax than Pennsylvania because the state Supreme Court ruled, back in the 1980s IIRC, that using property taxes as the method for funding the public schools violated the state constitution. Thus the Commonwealth provides more of the public schools’ budgets than the localities.
It’s obvious that the public schools have to be funded somehow, but from what I can see, property taxes aren’t the best way to do it.
Actually, I would think that liberals would be more in favor of that: since it’s income that’s taxed, not property, those taxes fall more heavily on those who have more income rather than on those who have greater property value. This eases the burden on retired people, who may have built up decent home values but have less in the way of income or liquid assets.
Of course, I personally benefit from this. In Kentucky, Social Security income is not taxed by the state, and there is a 50% homestead exemption in property taxes for people over 65. My property taxes for last year were a whopping $410, on property which cost only $4000 less than my home in the Keystone State . . . on which my property taxes were around $3,000 a year. And here, rather than half a double, I have a livable — though still fixer-upper — house, 7.92 acres of good land and 500 feet of frontage on the Kentucky River. This is a really great place to retire!
So far, we’ve added my garage/workshop for $11,500, and put $16,000 into the kitchen remodel — all of the work done by me — plus installed new hickory hardwood floors ($2,700 for the material), also done by me. I’ve rewired part of the house, and redone all of the plumbing. Since the county didn’t require any freaking permits, there are no government records leading to a reassessment of my property. 🙂 But even if there were a reassessment, it would probably increase my property taxes by less than $100 a year.
Alas! Property prices are so low around here that if I had to sell right now, I’d never get back what I’ve put into the place. But, since it’s our intention to live here until we go to our eternal rewards, that’s not too much of a concern.
I did have to get an electrical inspection when I installed the new electrical service to the shop. For that, I paid a licensed sparktrician, because that would make the inspection go right and get the power company to hook up the electricity and meter. That was $965.
Is it a surprise to you that, in New Castle County, with such a high percentage of parents putting their kids in private schools, that property tax referenda so frequently fail? There was one when I lived there, and naturally I voted against it; my daughters were in parochial school.
And it was the good people of New Castle County who practically destroyed the public schools in response to forced busing for desegregation orders. We knew what had happened when we moved there, and had we used the public schools, my younger daughter, who would have been in the third grade at the time, would have been bused from Hockessin, where we lived, to an inner city elementary school in Wilmington. Perhaps you can see why we might not have liked that? Of course, my kids were in parochial school before we moved to Delaware, so that was my plan there anyway.
“my younger daughter, who would have been in the third grade at the time, would have been bused from Hockessin, where we lived, to an inner city elementary school in Wilmington. Perhaps you can see why we might not have liked that?”
Fear of a black planet?
Seriously, though, we have no actual metric to measure the quality of schools. We use test scores, which measure students, not teachers, as a proxy, and it’s a lousy one. The best metric, in terms of lining up with results, was, is and probably will remain household income. HIgher income, better test results, “better schools.” Delaware schools “got worse” under busing because formerly all-white schools were suddenly populated by lots of kids from low-income backgrounds.
Alby wrote:
Using that metric, you can never really ‘score’ a school until long after the students have been graduated. When you use such a measurement as a current indicator, you are measuring the parents’ achievement, not the students’.
And it also sets up a trap: if intelligence and education are good predictors of financial success, and intelligence is an inherited trait, then you are setting up the claim that white Americans are smarter than black Americans. You sure that you want to do that?
Intelligence and education are not the same thing. One can have intelligence and a poor education or lack intelligence and get a good education.
Perhaps you have seen information about how Americans manage to pass wealth on from generation to generation at a higher rate than other industrialized societies. This is referred to as the “glass floor.”
Financial success is dependent on neither, unless you’re willing to concede that, say, successful drug dealers must be intelligent to have made so much money.
You, sir, are the one who made the connection you are attributing to me.
I blame it on your lack of education.
“it was the good people of New Castle County who practically destroyed the public schools in response to forced busing for desegregation orders. ”
Dana’s not wrong about that. And… wait for it…
“There was one [referendum] when I lived there, and naturally I voted against it; my daughters were in parochial school.”
Naturally.
What, Mr Puck is surprised that I voted against a property tax increase?
When we lived in the First State, we were renting, not buying. Still, property tax increases are passed on to renters in their monthly payments. Those of us who were paying for private and parochial schools have little desire to have to pay more for the public schools into which we chose not to put our children.
inner city
Speak of a broke-ass Republican dumbfuck, and one appears. I knew some asswipe would fly to the defense of the 40 or so people who would be asked to do their patriotic duty.
Warren’s wealth tax is constitutional under the standards laid down by the Founders, as this article will demonstrate. Apportionment of a wealth or land tax by population would now require the injustice of substantially higher tax rates in poorer states: when that happens, under the Founders’ standards, the tax is not a direct tax for which apportionment is required. Apportionment was not written to protect wealth from assault, as proponents of its unconstitutionality now claim, but rather to reach wealth by what was thought to be the best then available measure of wealth.
I love how terrified they are of her.
The magat tears under a Warren presidency will be a needed salve after these few years.
To be fair, they are terrified of everything. That’s what makes them conservative — they fear change. Look up the brain research. They have a higher fear response than the rest of us. They call it “being smart.”