These are things that help your business create more wealth. As the grandfather comment said, it's wanting the 30c bonus without paying the 20c fee.
Let alone the fact that you are already paying taxes: income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes, etc. etc. to pay for all of the benefits that society provides. If the wealth tax is going to replace some of those, then sure maybe we can talk about whether it's more efficient or effective than any of those. If we're just going to keep piling on tax after tax "because society" maybe we should ask if society needs to get its act together and use the tax revenue it already gets more efficiently.
2) Social benefits accrue to everyone, including wealthy people. They just accrue equally to everyone rather than unequally to your specific wealth. That's an important distinction here because you're basically saying you should get favoritism for your wealth because you happen to have more of it. That's a bit of a weird stance.
3) In case it's not clear, the US doesn't currently collect enough tax revenue to actually pay for a well-functioning society. Take a look at [1]. If you want a first-world society on par with Denmark or Sweden, guess what...
I'm not arguing for any kind of favoritism. You're saying we should welcome a wealth tax as a kind of management fee. I'm only pointing out that that is not the case. The government does not have any responsibility to act in your specific interest the way a wealth manager does. It is a false equivalence.
> In case it's not clear, the US doesn't currently collect enough tax revenue to actually pay for a well-functioning society. Take a look at [1]. If you want a first-world society on par with Denmark or Sweden, guess what...
Your chart shows taxation as a percentage of GDP. There are two ways that your tax revenue might be a low percentage of GDP, one is low taxes, the other is high GDP. The US also has a much higher GDP than any of these countries.
Are you arguing that the amount of money needed to "pay for a well-functioning society" is proportional to the GDP? That if our society produces lots of valuable goods and services then this means that it needs to spend more government money? Intuitively I would think the opposite would be true. A high GDP means a lot of people are producing valuable things, which should mean they need less assistance from the government.
I see what you're thinking on GDP, but the things a wealth tax would go to fund (and does go to fund where it exists today) are percentage of GDP services. Things like healthcare, education, and a social safety net. These services naturally rise in cost in accordance with GDP because standard of living is supposed to rise with GDP per capita as well. This is why topics like healthcare cost are just about always framed in per capita or % of GDP terms. It's just that in the US our inequality distorts things considerably. You're also implicitly conflating averages with medians. It is 100% possible that a high GDP reflects that monetary value is being produced by a small portion of the population (possibly by exploiting workers), while the rest of the population needs more government assistance. There's a strong case that the US embodies this situation more and more over time.
> Things like healthcare, education, and a social safety net. These services naturally rise in cost in accordance with GDP because standard of living is supposed to rise with GDP per capita as well.
They don't have to. A more efficient and advanced economy should produce basic necessities with less effort and therefore less cost than less productive economies. The costs of things like healthcare and education in the US are vastly distorted for a number of reasons.
I don't think siphoning off wealth from productive areas of the economy and pushing into areas that are already overpriced is going to help. Education, for example, already receives massive Federal subsidies via guaranteed loans. That hasn't made it less expensive. It's made it more expensive as college raise prices to match the amount of capital available to pay them.
Capitalism is selfish. Human is selfish. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Stop moral highgrounding.
2) That’s very debatable. Most benefits nowadays go to The middle classes to the detriment of lower classes.
3) Are you aware that Sweden had a wealth tax? It was a bad idea, it was repealed.