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Comment by village-idiot | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn’t the progressive tax system, the problem is the heaping pile of exceptions and special rules that take forever to wade through. All a flat tax would do is make it even easier for the ultra-wealthy to pay less.

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Could be a wealth tax instead of income tax.

But, let's stop worrying about "the wealthy"...just make a systems that's easy for everyone and funds the government. Soaking the rich shouldn't be the goal...a balanced government budget providing the basic services we together agree on should be the goal.

How does a wealth tax work when the majority of your assets are illiquid? Stake in a company, real estate, etc. are difficult to tax and still have predictable recurring tax revenue, right?

It works great! We shouldn't be allowing people to avoid taxation, or a wealth tax, by structuring their wealth into illiquid assets, purposefully or accidentally.

You’ve just made it completely impractical for anyone to invest their cash in, say, heavy machinery or a new fabrication plant.

Is that your intention?

It's pretty clear he wants to tax people out of spite.

Guessing the intentions of others is an ugly look.

Did I? If you invest in a piece of heavy machinery does it just sit around doing nothing, i.e. not generating any sort of profit.

No it's an item that produces work, unlike a painting which I'm totally OK with making it impractical to invest in.

"illiquid asset" was all you wrote. That's completely orthogonal to "doing nothing."

How would you have handled taxing commercial/investment property (illiquid asset) from 2006-2012. Do you mark to market? If so, how? How can you do this at scale so the process is fairly applied in all regions, repeatable and trackable?

IANAA(I am not an appraiser), but I'd assume there exists processes to value these assets already. Maybe these processes were gamed in the lead up to 2008, but that doesn't mean safeguards can't be implemented(or not purposely weakened) to prevent this.

Part of the point of a progressive taxation system is to help clamp down on wealth inequality. The ultra wealthy have more means at their disposal to turn their wealth into more wealth or political power. A strong progressive tax system and an estate tax is necessary to prevent them from turning into a literal aristocracy.

So yes, I consider “soaking the rich” a valid policy goal, despite your pejorative spin.

there's already a tax on wealth/savers, its called inflation.

Few people hold all their wealth in banknotes, and none of them are rich. The rich invest their wealth in companies and assets that appreciate much faster than inflation.

Inflation is a tax on currency, not a tax on wealth.

Real estate is wealth but inflation doesn't decrease its value. Stocks are wealth but inflation doesn't decrease their value.

Quibble on stocks: as with other asset classes, they are highly sensitive to the quantity of money and availability of credit, so they're not insensitive to inflation. Though they are generally positively affected by increases in the money supply: see QE and US stock market respose.

Eh, is also what we tax.

We tax cancelled debt as income. Simple enough at first glance.

But when is debt cancelled vs restructured?

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