Ouch. Two billion dollars. That could have been put into much better use, imagine being able to fund the Iran war for one more day.

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arjie 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's funny how this kind of pricing works. A bag of weed captured is estimated at a thousand dollars. Ten movies pirated at twice that. We fire a JASSM in combat and it costs a lot of money. We fire it in training and it costs nothing. There is no financial impact estimated to require all elevators be big enough to turn a full length gurney around. A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year. $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno.

I bought my car for $32k. To replace it would be $50k. I crash it, am I out $32k or $50k? Or some other number? Numerically, it could be anything.

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AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year.

Isn't this the opposite of how a wealth tax works? The annual turnover for e.g. Apple stock is ~0.4%, so a 0.8%/year wealth tax would triple the number of sellers without adding any new buyers. The negative effect on the price is outsized because most people hold long-term rather than buying or selling in any given year, but now people have to liquidate some every year in order to pay the government because you're taxing unrealized gains. And then because "wealth" is calculated as share price times number of shares, when the share price goes down, everyone's "wealth" goes down and with it next year's revenue from a wealth tax.

There would be some limits on that in terms of the compounding negative effect on the share price because (among other things) if the price went down then foreign investors would find it more attractive to buy in and then they're not subject to the tax and don't have to sell every year to pay it, but causing more of the market to be owned by foreign rather than domestic taxpayers over time is also not a thing which leads to stable domestic tax revenue.

> $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno.

The current UN estimate is more like $100 billion a year to end world hunger, whereas the initial build of a rail line is a one-time cost.

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datsci_est_2015 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Some disjointed thoughts of mine on this topic:

Some people have to adjust their mortgage in order to pay property taxes. Most people pay property taxes out of their income.

What percentage of Americans, especially home-owning Americans, have more wealth in the stock market than in their home?

Property tax has the positive effect of encouraging efficient land usage and discouraging speculation and rent seeking. Is there a parallel case to be made for stock holdings, or is such an argument dead in the water because land is more tangible than company shares?

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jquery 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The purpose of wealth taxes is redistributive, not revenue maximization of a spherical cow.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What does that have to do with the revenue claim being questionable? Also, if that was the goal, wouldn't it be better to tax (or break up) the corporations rather than the shareholders? It comes out of their pocket either way, but forcing asset sales has a lot of negative consequences. On top of that, it handles the problem that the CEO of a huge company has too much power regardless of what percentage of the company's stock they own, as a result of the size of the company rather than the size of their personal ownership of it.
	▲	datsci_est_2015 26 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I prefer the phrasing “more liquid and efficient allocation of capital” over “wealth redistribution”.

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dnnehgf 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

good list.

if you were to send me an article containing a new one of these each day, with citations, i would pay you $1 per day.

but if you were to send me an article containing a new one of these each day, with citations, plus a bunch of econ theory rationalizing it, i would pay you $0.

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falcor84 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why not both?

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anonym29 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I can think of about 39 trillion reasons... https://www.usdebtclock.org/

	▲	LoganDark 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		How do I get rid of the weird popup that wants me to download a pdf? Edit: there's a button in the top-right that says "Secret Window"
	▲	6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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