Hacker News Reader

Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

You cannot functionally limit wealth. Does 10 million include assets? What about company ownership? If a piece of art is worth more than 10 million, does it need to be owned by more than one person? Does it need to be cut in two?

If something you own appreciates and your wealth increases as a result, how quickly before you have to divest that asset?

What about non profit organizations? What about IP? What about software? When Minecraft was sold by a single owner, it was worth 10 million many, many times over. When exactly would it have been necessary for him to sell his company, and who would he have been obligated to sell it to?

View on HN

I think all of your concerns disappear when the answer is that the wealth part is not relevant - it is the monetization of that wealth. You can’t eat art or stock. We already tax when you sell the art or stock or earn income off it. What we don’t tax is the use of those things as collateral for loans, but beyond a certain value we should do that.

Then when you die, it all is converted to a dollar value in transferring to others and at that point there should be a massively hefty tax above a certain dollar value. We need to eliminate dynasties and the use of money for influence. Cap wealth at $50m or something.

> we don’t tax is the use of those things as collateral for loans

So you wanna tax my mortgage?

> Cap wealth at $50m or something.

That just encourages hiding it.

> So you wanna tax my mortgage?

If you are worth $50m+ and then use a mortgage to generate cash rather than take cash out of your company in order to avoid triggering taxes that affect everyone else, then yes, yes I do.

> That just encourages hiding it.

Well then I guess we should just give up trying. Let’s keep allowing our economy to look more and more like Hunger Games rather than try literally anything at all.

Ok. Say I use that mortgage to develop new housing. Now you made that housing effectively more expensive...

The fact that you can come up with ridiculous scenarios does not automatically mean that the idea is either ridiculous or inherently flawed.

How are those "ridiculous scenarios?" Any attempt to base laws around the net worth of an individual is going to run into a hundred thousand such scenarios instantly. A person's "wealth" is simply not well defined. Neither ownership nor valuation of any kind of asset, other than cash itself, is nearly straightforward enough.

this is true, I asked the IRS agent to define wealth and they couldn't do it, therefore meaning I no longer have to pay taxes

Income -- being funneled through the unifying medium of US dollars usually, and having some other counterparty to the transaction available to verify things -- is a lot simpler to account for than wealth, and look how complex that still is, and how readily it is already circumvented. And that's with a hundred years of refining and reforming the tax code to stop it, which a wealth-based taxation scheme would not benefit from.

If we had to have a perfect system with no flaws on day one in order to implement this, you would have a solid argument. But while that would be ideal, we don't actually have to have that, so your argument is completely beside the point.

Worse: Most of the circumventions of income tax are to increase in wealth without having income (as recognized by the tax system). A wealth tax is therefore a fix for your complaints about income tax.

Look, I'm not convinced a wealth tax (or worse, cap) is the answer. I suspect it may be worse than the disease. But your arguments against it seem pretty weak.

Nothing about this except the idea of a limit is ridiculous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com