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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Taxing the rich seems to be one of the hardest things in the world to do. They can afford the best lobbyists to influence politicians to write loopholes in whatever laws you can think of to tax them

More to the point, they can hire the best propagandists to spread the idea that it's too hard to tax them and you should do something else.

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Oh that’s right, the PR firm mails me my check today ;-)

No seriously, am I wrong? Has taxing the rich ever been successful in the long term?

Take for example the much-lauded United States marginal tax rates of the 1950s. Do your research and you’ll find that the wealthy evaded those taxes quite handily.

I don’t see how it’s possible to get any more blood from that turnip. Better solutions are needed.

We could increase the estate tax and capital gains taxes. They're much harder to avoid, the focus purely on income tax is the problem.

Google loopholes in capital gains taxes. Lots of ways to avoid them. The wealthy can hire experts.

I'm familiar but none of them are very good. The only really good way to avoid capital gains taxes is to die and use your estate tax exemption on the securities you hold. Which is why increasing the estate tax rate and decreasing it's exemption in tandem with an increase in capital gains is the best way to tax the wealthy.

Who would pass these capital gains taxes? Politicians, right? The same ones who can be influenced by lobbyists?

When these laws are passed, will assets be sheltered by accountants?

I know a Bitcoin millionaire. He avoided capital gains taxes this year by upgrading his Jeep. The money that would have gone to taxes, he used instead for upgrades, because of a loophole that permits upgrades to be taxed at a much lower rate.

They’re smart, the rich.

Or, even easier and more effective, abolish estate and gift and capital gains taxes, and tax inheritances, gifts, and capital gains as normal income to the people recieving them.

Because for some recipients, especially for the non-rich, these are non-repeatable, you do need to add some handling to the regular income tax system to address inconsistent incomes with multi-year smoothing mechanisms to make taxation of those kinds of income fair, but that also makes taxation of variable regular income more fair, too.

It depends what you mean by successful. The Soviet Union and China were both very successful at taxing the rich. The consequences of doing so were disastrous, however.

How many wealthy in the Soviet Union or China were still there after their revolutions?

I don't know how successful they were at confiscating existing fortunes, but the point is that they were extremely successful at preventing new fortunes from being accumulated.

Equality, comrade.

It may be hard to get effective tax rates for high earners above 40%, but it would be eminently feasible to get them back up to 40%, where they stood before Bush and now Trump went off and reduced effective tax rates for high earners so much.

I just mailed the feds my owed taxes for 2017; my high earner effective federal tax rate is ridiculously low (lower, because of the cut off for social security at ~120k, than significantly less well paid people).

I didn’t ask for these tax cuts, and they’re certainly not enhancing my propensity to work, they’re just going to allow me to retire earlier.

But if your point is that income taxes aren’t an awesome way to raise revenue, I’m with you. Land-value-taxes would be almost impossible to avoid, and would have the salutory effect of improving efficiency in dense urban areas.

Would a land value tax be priced on farms as well? I wouldn’t think so, else you risk pricing farmers out of business. Have you noticed how many wealthy people own vineyards? Put some greenhouses on it and call it a farm.

The wealthy are clever, or they can hire some downright clever people to help them. Better solutions are needed.

Of course a land value tax would apply to farms.

If rich people want to move out to rural areas to lower their taxes, that’s fine by me.

The main difficulty with land value taxation is deciding what the actual land value is.

The effective tax rate in the 1950s wasn't actually substantially higher than it is today. [0] A high top-marginal rate is only a small part of the story.

[0] https://files.taxfoundation.org/20170804133536/Average-Effec...

Try asking Teddy Roosevelt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt#Trust_busti...

How many of today’s politicians have the conviction and perseverance of Roosevelt? Especially in the face of donors?

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