Hacker News Reader

Comment by undersuit | Hacker News Reader

And right after your paraphrased quote, after describing one of the reasons those wealth taxes failed one: “Too many people just start from the assumption that it’s impossible,”

May I inquire, are you starting from this position as well?

View on HN

Article 1, Section 9 prohibits direct taxes (which a wealth tax would definitely be) unless apportioned by state population. So it is unconstitutional unless every state agrees on an apportionment arrangement, which is nigh impossible as low population states will not receive much of the benefit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_tax#U.S._constitutional...

That is an unscientific statement. If 15 countries have tried and failed, the burden of proof is on providing evidence that another attempt would not similarly fail. Empirically speaking, the evidence speaks against the efficacy of wealth taxes.

There are plenty of things in existence that took more than 15 tries to get right. It is silly to dismiss something because it has failed the last 15 times.

If wealth taxes are beneficial and a good goal to work towards for a society, then it might be worth it to try for a 16th or even a 17th time until someone figures it out. Human flight took plenty of tries too, but it was something we deemed beneficial, so we figured it out.. eventually.

Anyway, Property taxes are a kind of wealth tax, as are capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes. All three of those are wide spread and well established.

Capital gains taxes are income taxes, not wealth taxes.

The person you’re responding to isn’t saying we should dismiss wealth taxes out of hand. They are saying that 100% of the evidence so far is that they do not work. So the burden of proof is on the person in favor of them.

Right, the proposal for try 16 needs to say: we are we succeed this time because tries 1-15 had flaw X and we have remedy Y that overcomes it.

15 countries failing doesn't actually seem to be 100% of the evidence so far. What about Argentina, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Italy (and BC in Canada) listed here as currently having wealth taxes?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax#Current_examples

Yeah, my comment was about the argument, not about the actual facts. I don't actually know anything about the facts.

Those are asset taxes (with the exception of Italy's 0.15% foreign investment value tax) and it's not hard to hide wealth in liabilities/investments. The über wealthy would barely be affected by such laws should they be enacted in the US while those most affected would be the unlucky few who managed to buy a family sized home in a Californian metro suburb and farmers. I know the "inhereted wealth (estate) taxes kill family farms" is a Republican trope but a tax on assets would disproportionately affect those who own real property and outside of the wealthiest urban centers and their elite suburbs, that would be people who own hundreds or thousands of "cheap" acreage. I have a friend who recently took over his family's 1,200 acre, certified organic dairy farm and a 0.75% asset tax would almost assuredly have him call it quits and sell off to a regional Wal-Mart-tier agribusiness. He only nets ~$100k/yr off of property assessed at $2m and lopping ~$15k/yr off his take home income would be enough incentive, in my opinion, for him to go back to hos $80k/yr industrial equipment sales job.

You don't need to prove that an experiment will not fail.

> You don't need to prove that an experiment will not fail.

You do before experimenting with the lives, livelihoods and quality of life of 350 million people.

Or, if not prove, at least provide some really compelling reasons why this time it's different.

FWIW, I think that a Georgist land value tax would be better than a straight wealth tax.

> Or, if not prove, at least provide some really compelling reasons why this time it's different.

What qualifies as "really compelling" is subjective, but sure, I didn't mean to suggest that you should just try the same thing again and again.

> You do before experimenting with the lives, livelihoods and quality of life of 350 million people.

The way I see it, if an experiment fails, it does limited damage which you can recover from. Of course, the greater the possible damage the more careful you have to be and the higher the threshold to start the experiment should be. But if it succeeds, you permanently improve your society and learn what works.

When the possible loss is limited and temporary while the possible gain may last until the end of civilization, I don't think you should be too conservative. Though running experiments on 350 million is kind of overkill when there are smaller countries. Maybe it's a better policy for large countries to ask smaller ones to experiment, promising to help them recover if they fail.

> FWIW, I think that a Georgist land value tax would be better than a straight wealth tax.

Sure, but what non-pigovian tax isn't worse than an LVT?

I sure hope that those who are dismissive of a wealth tax are offering alternative proposals that would fix this problem. I don't want a world where a handful of random babies a born into more wealth than the bottom one billion humans will ever have.

The alternative is protecting and even strengthening estate taxes and perhaps something like Bernie Sanders' wall street high frequency transaction tax idea.

"wealth tax" is already a biased framing of specific design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com