Because you’re poor and don’t have any influence over tax policy or enforcement.
It’s all bullshit guys, like on the other side we have to pay $1500 a month rent because the bank doesn’t believe we can afford a $1000 a month mortgage.
Anyway I’m pretty sure $1,000 mortgage payments are a thing of the past.
I mean it’s math if you take out a $160k mortgage for a $200k house today it’s gonna be right around $1000/mo
Hfs, i never drew that correlation before. Yeah, fuk them.
That simplistic comparison has absolutely zero relationship to reality. Think about it a bit more, if you know how making money on stock investing works, and see if you can find the differences.
I am a dumb average guy who is not an economist. Could you please explain the differences?
No! Snark and condescension only!
To play devil’s advocate, a lot of money that is tied up in retirement accounts of the “average Joe” would also be taxed, so if your retirement accounts aren’t outpacing your income tax rate, then it’d hurt main street too
“I wont explain my point that is very much wrong, and instead will (attempt to) make you sound like the fool, when in reality I am an insufferable douchebag that cant see he has tread into water before learning to swim”
10/10, no notes.
I didn’t think I had to explicitly repeat what I said in a couple other comments I made on the matter. I won’t cut and paste that for you, (and since you set the mode to name calling) shithead.
I dont talk to someone assuming they know what I said to some other dude 15 minutes ago. I can tell youre terminally online
Lol! You have zero clue. I’m close to the opposite of the on line spectrum. I learned how to be informed in the old days, when we were taught his to read and research.
When I don’t know something, I look it up. In discussion forums, I read the other comments before making my own, usually. If someone tells me I’m wrong, I go see what shows up elsewhere on the topic. Most importantly, I’m not immediately condescending or insulting.
Research /= googling
Okay, I’ll bite. Other than going to a full-featured library, or contacting the nearest university with expertise on the desired topic, what does count as research for a layperson?
Twitter screenshot meme slactivism aside, it’s because private land is a limited resource. The more you keep for yourself, the more you pay (generally).
Plus, property tax is one of the only taxes that really hits wealthy people hard.
In California the property taxes are such that it punishes people that didn’t buy a house 30 years ago. The apartment I rent pays property taxes on a valuation of ~$250k. This property just went for sale at $1.2 million. Whoever buys it now will pay property taxes on a $1.2 million valuation, while right now due to how the law is structured, the current owner pays taxes on $250k.
It’s just a big fuck you by the system. The tax law was modified because they saw that if they kept increasing the tax proportionally with the market value of the home, soon a bunch people would lose their homes because wages are stagnant and home prices are rocketing. So they passed this cap that helps current homeowners.
I don’t know if there is a reasonable tax under these conditions where home speculation and investment-mindset inflates home prices while wages are stagnant and inflation is a bustling.
It’s wild how the rules work. We pay taxes on every little unrealized gain, while the wealthy can enjoy tax-free yachting lifestyles in Dubai with zero capital gains or annual taxes. The gap just keeps getting wider.
Note that property taxes, when reassessed every 10 years or so, are also adjusted with changes to the mil rate, as appropriate to keep taxes from property assessment changes from causing people to leave town.
Equities change in value daily. How should those be assessed, and what is the proper response when the equities decrease in value by 30% during a market crash? Does the government refund the previously paid taxes? What if that money is your retirement income?
At what point does a tax on equities essentially become a continuous draw-down of wealth on the same money year after year, resulting in absolutely no incentive to invest in business and for that matter a situation where it is impossible to build up any wealth? How will startups be funded? How will large, shoot for the stars projects be funded?
At what point does a tax on equities essentially become a continuous draw-down of wealth on the same money year after year, resulting in absolutely no incentive to invest in business and for that matter a situation where it is impossible to build up any wealth? How will startups be funded? How will large, shoot for the stars projects be funded?
That’s actually the point: use taxes to force rich people to make high risk investments.
If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your farm to pay the property taxes, then you sell your farm to pay the taxes and someone else gets to put the capital to better use.
If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your $10B company to pay the wealth tax, then you have to sell enough of it to pay the tax, and someone else gets more say in how the company runs.
Wealth tax encourages people with ungodly fortunes to make bigger, more risky bets, because they have to overcome the constant drain of wealth tax. Ultra-wealthy shouldn’t just coast along on the low returns of super-safe investments, because those are the people who can afford to lose part of their fortune.
Instead, we have the guy with $1000 YOLOing his life savings on GME options, because the $80 he can get from an index fund isn’t going to get him to retirement, while Berkshire Hathaway is sitting of $300B of US treasuries.
don’t worry cousin. your ships gonna come in someday and all the fretting about taxing the rich will be worth it.
Technically it was people they hired to convince us.
At a certain level of wealth, we should be taxing wealth quarterly.
Grant an exception for a single place of residence (sure, let it be magnificent, whatever, but only 1).
Wealth taxes can have brackets like income taxes do.
Also, more luxury taxes etc!
But none of it is so simple that it can’t be done by a computer. Instead we need a whole industry of middlemen because it’s so convoluted and opaque…but also they know what you owe, and then want you to tell them. It’s fucking dumb.
Okay a history lesson on how capitalism started and feudalism fell.
When you are “rich” in feudal society it means you have land. Land that everyone sees, that gives predictable income and even least educated peasant would be able to tax you reasonably (reasonably = as high as possible without you starting a rebellion over it). But then come merchants - they can have a wagon full of wood or just a small pouch of spices and it would be worth the same. Nobody really knows how much their wares earn because it fluctuates and every goods transport is a huge risk. So the merchants gain wealth indefinitely because king can’t see how much they have ant tax them accordingly, while landowners get poor because they are taxed to oblivion.
Now who is the modern “nobility”? Who has wealth tied up and measured in such a way that government knows exactly how much to tax them? Wage workers. In fact your employer rats you out to government on how much you earn. In exchange things like companies, banks, stocks, loans etc. are in the “nobody knows how much they are worth” category. Say you are taxed 10% on the value of all the stocks you own, this means you have to sell 10% of your stocks annually, and by selling stocks you make those stocks less valuable for everyone… so technically they should be taxed less because value drops down? Generally speaking if taxing something changes it’s value drastically then governments avoid taxing it.
My personal solution - outlaw stocks, bonds and loans for fucks sake.
Just have countries force the “you can’t charge interest” rule on Christians.
Islam coming later was able to see the obvious loophole so they added you can’t accept loans with interest btw.
Though this does interfere with separation of church and state it seems countries already forgot about that.
IMO just stop letting them borrow against the unrealized values. You can borrow against what you’ve paid taxes on.
Say you are taxed 10% on the value of all the stocks you own, this means you have to sell 10% of your stocks annually, and by selling stocks you make those stocks less valuable for everyone… so technically they should be taxed less because value drops down?
Just a note, suggesting a 10% tax is pure fear mongering that billionaires and capitalists use to scare people. The average property tax rate in the United States is 1.1% so that’s a reasonable percentage to give. People don’t sell 1% of their home every year.
Property taxes are a thing. Stocks are property.
I honest to god used 10% as an idea of “ridiculously low tax” but I guess the topic of problems with billionaires may be too american for me.
Stocks should be taxed on buy/sell and yearly hold though.
Yeah, the financial market was never actually useful. Its just a money vacuum that the rich benefit from
I enjoyed reading this perspective, thanks. It’s definitely compelling.
they only need to convince the conservative plebs.
I mean the extremely literal answer is roughly:
All counties/cities have a bureaucracy dedicated to doing the equivalent of yearly audits to determine your home/property’s value.
This does not exist for corporate capital assets.
Instead, the audits are privately conducted (either internally or via a contracted private accounting firm), and valuations are basically only issued around time of sale, when corporate capital changes specific private ownership.
Even earnings reports are not done by an outside agency for the purposes of assessing a tax, they’re either done privately by the owner (again, internal or contracted out), or as private market research for something like a hedge fund or something like that.
We as a society (legal system?) just decided that homes get a bureaucracy and taxation, capital does not, it plays by different rules.
And by that what I really mean is that ever since FDR, the wealthy have conspired to construct this legal reality bit by bit, compromise by compromise, PR campaign by PR campaign, over time.
So that gets us eventually to Citizens United where money buys elections and laws officially and thus Democracy dies.
Its… its the oligarchy baked into the system, been like this for quite a long time.
Its not that its… any kind of theoretically impossible to imagine a or many different kinds of systems…
Its that rich people have rigged so many things so far in their favor, for so long, that they believe these artificial engineered differences … are fundamental rules of reality.
Like yes they’re very hubristic and classist… but a part of it is that they’ve basically indoctrinated themselves into thinking this is… objectively correct. Its sort of like a religion, its their dogma.
I will note that at least some billionaires don’t buy into this dogma nearly at all… either out of genuine empathy and humanity, or pure self preservation of not wanting to be guillotined… you do end up with the ‘Tom Steyer <-> Mr Wonderful’ spectrum.
Of course, the Steyer types are exceedingly uncommon.
That’s why they’re going to great lengths to remove or at least weaken government legislation limiting their acquisition to more wealth, while putting the screws on anyone below them.
Wealthy folks (in general) are heavily involved in property and consequently pay considerable property taxes. This is something everyone is quite equal on.
It is taxed as the post describes due to being a limited resource, unlike financial instruments, which are not a limited resource.
That might be correct in some places but not where I live.
Recurring taxes on property are calculated with the age of houses taken into consideration. This means the property value for taxation actually decreases over time, unless a given area undergoes through a serious development effort that forces property value up. This can reach such extreme cases that it is possible to get away with remodelling a house - as in a single standing building - completely, fully modernize it, and still keep its property value untouched, unless swimming pools and other value increasing additions are put in.
Property value and commercial value are separate and independent concepts. A property appraised for taxation in 100€ can sell for 100 times that value. There will be sale fees taxes applied to the transactions itself, for the buyer, and the seller may have to pay income taxes on the sale, but there are way to skirt most of these.
And then there are rents.
I pay more taxes on my work than a person for the rent they receive by renting property. It used to be a flat rate of 28%, equal to deposit interest and other values, but then someone said if the taxation on rents was to go down, the rents would go down and more housing would come into the market. Except it did not happen and instead rents shot up and opaque companies started buying homes to rent from people that could not be bothered to manage what they had and pay their taxes on a yearly basis.
Everyone loses.
I agree with the core argument, here, but…
Interesting how “unrealized gains” only become a problem when wealthy folks are involved
…do you think wealthy people don’t own property? 🤔
Ah! So you’re telling me that wealthy people DO get taxed on the unrealized gains of the properties they own? Just like us normies do?
Not for long, see the push by Republican groups for abolishing property tax.
If property taxes are abolished it better be for EVERYBODY, not just for billionaires & corporations & private equity groups.
In the US, the mortgage interest tax write-off goes disproportionately to the wealthy. It also inflates housing prices, so it doesn’t really help affordability. Certainly not enough to justify the cost.
