Bill Gates calls for income tax in Washington state

I like Bill, but I agree.

Notice how averse Bill was to Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax idea. That's a tax that would actually impact his bottom line.

Instead he supports an income tax -- which would effect working people the same way a wealth tax would effect him -- but would have almost no impact on his personal wealth.

Not sure why you get downvoted. Most people with more money and especially on his level have only little exposure to income taxes. Even the estate taxes will not have a big impact when doing proper tax planning.

What? He's explicitly saying it will impact him directly.

It's almost always the case that more well off people are against taxes because they naturally contribute more than they use of the tax pool. People with low incomes are usually the ones benefiting the most from higher tax rates.

At least read the beginning of the article.

> ”It was nearly two decades ago that my dad and I started calling for an increase in the federal estate tax and for an estate tax in our home state of Washington”

ha you just don't want to pay your fair share.

If he were poor, he'd be accused of egoism. If normal upper or middle class, of hypocrisy. There's a suitable ad hominem for everyone.

At a certain level of wealth people become unbiased. They can look at a system from an impartial point of view because they are so wealthy they are no longer part of the system.

Bill Gates is so rich that income tax is no longer a factor for him anymore. When he says that Washington needs an increase in income tax he's giving an unbiased point of view. I trust his intentions more than I trust my own.

I am not elite, therefore I participate in the system. My own individual wants and desires tell me that I don't want to be taxed. My view of the system as a whole is therefore clouded by my own selfish desires.

Perhaps his position needs to be rebranded to be even more inline with intentions: An exclusive tax for the elite.

You need look no further than the other side of the Columbia River to see the trade-off. Most years, Washington has the most regressive tax regime in the United States, Oregon has the least regressive. Oregon has an income tax and no sales tax.

WA has high sales tax. Poor people pay a larger portion of taxes in WA compared to elsewhere.

What if you couldn't pass anything on at all? What if the only way to guarantee a decent future for your kids is if you work to guarantee a future for everyone's kids?

That's what the estate tax is meant to do - to help prevent a landed-gentry and aristocracy from emerging which would subvert the republic.

Less inequality for sure.

Also, probably half of people who otherwise continued to earn money past the say, $10M mark (as you put it above) would just totally stop.

To some this would be really cool: you'd get more artists maybe, and fewer obstinate bankers that continue to plunder society. To others this may be bad if you think those people otherwise would have created value for society.

I support the notion of capping how much you pass on after death. I’m against dynasties.

I don’t support simply giving that money to the government. In the country my husband is from, government has plundered their national resources and directly the treasury chest. In the towns I grew up in, in the Midwest, I saw similar patterns. My high school didn’t teach calculus, but we took loans or raised taxes to fund football stadiums, etc.

Government is not a great allocator. Unless we can create some framework to hold officials accountable, I’m not convinced the billions the Bill Gates of the world leave behind would go to helping student debt (which in my opinion it should) or counter homelessness instead of another 20 year war in the Middle East.

Not trying to turn this political but just trying to convey my view.

Why wouldn't people be allowed the freedom to pass on whatever wealth they want? What if they choose to defer gratification and are working to support future generations? Shouldn't that be their individual choice? It seems arbitrary for the government to seize that.

Why should the government be entitled to it, though? The government has shown itself to be a terrible steward of wealth. I would rather we prioritize incentives to use existing money more efficiently and cut wasteful spending vs. increasing the amount of money pouring into the coffers.

Not much; the really wealthy would find workarounds.

> He addressed the need to tax wealth

Did he? Where? He said he supported an estate tax -- which he obviously wouldn't pay until dying.

Most talk of a wealth tax is about taxing wealth while you're alive.

"Regressive tax" is simply a loaded pejorative for "uniform" or "fair" tax. Washington's tax system encourages taxpayers to actually consider what things they want to spend money on, since it is their own money that does it. A heavily graduated tax system (a "progressive" tax system) introduces moral hazards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard) because many voters would not be spending their own money.

The value of IP law for the consumer is in the work itself, which often would not exist but for the ability for its creator to profit from it.

Now as to taxing IP: property (wealth) just is not taxed right now, at least in the US and with the exception of land and/or buildings. There are reasons for and against that, and they pretty much apply to IP, too.

If some state decided to start taxing wealth, IP would be no exemption, although there are a few of specific difficulties with it. IP you created yourself is fiendishly difficult to evaluate, something that is easier if you just bought it, where the market-based price is assumed to be a good proxy for worth.

IP is a huge governmental tax on the general public that accrues to a small number of wealthy people. (Any governmentally-enforced monopoly would be the same.) Taxing it would effectively reduce that somewhat, but it's easier to simply reduce IP in the first place. Make copyright 5 years instead of infinite, for example. That has the dual benefit of bringing a lot of content into the public domain and also being similar in effect to a tax on IP. (Think of it, if you like, as a 0% tax on IP for the first five years followed by a 100% tax on IP.)

What? If you make income on ip you get taxed. This point is strange.

> why is no one calling for a tax on intellectual property? This is an interesting idea that I haven't considered before. Do you know if anyone has looked into its feasibility?

Progressive income tax reduces wealth inequality. People start in a very unfair game and it prevents the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer. Wealth inequality tears communities apart.

It's not a punishment for being productive. I think the argument is that, in some way, government services / infrastructure / foreign relations facilitated your productivity or created an opportunity for you to be productive.

Income tax is the government being lazy and stealing from their citizens, instead of thinking about what businesses to invest stocks in for example in order to generate revenue.

There are still corporate business taxes in Washington, and they are revenue based instead of profit based (extremely backwards, but it certainly isn't no taxation). The primary benefit is for personal income.

It is hard to forget how the Microsoft-led "Business Software Alliance" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance) threatened companies who planned to introduce free software.

Personal story: When I was a teenager in the 90s I didn't understand why companies bought their inferior product - in terms of hardware requirement, because in the former Soviet block you likely had access to obsolete hardware, even in corporate offices - over the free alternatives. Then, when I started my own business in 2002, one day the BSA suddenly visited on my office door with two policeman and asked for proof for the licence we use. We had Linux and BSD boxes, so we showed them the online MIT and Linux licences, but they wasn't happy, because it wasn't in Hungarian and wasn't officially issued on paper by a recognised organisation. So I we had a pre-court summoning, had pay for a lawyer and pay for an official translation that cost us a lot of cash we didn't have, some falling out hair and cold sweat, because if we the judge fines us, we didn't have the cash to pay and that means jail time. Luckily the local Linux User Group made some noise and the BSA dropped the case, but I can guess the majority of the businesses just force-fed the IT dept with Windows and Office for the safety. To put the cost into perspective comparison, in 2000, the National Minimum Wage in Hungary was $119: https://tradingeconomics.com/hungary/minimum-wages, and a Microsoft Office 2000 was $499: https://news.microsoft.com/1999/01/07/microsoft-announces-of... and the Microsoft Windows 98SE $199: https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/01/13/ms_pricing_strategy... , so companies had all the interest to use the free Sun OpenOffice (née StarOffice) and X Window System, skip the need for more expensive Windows Servers and not to mention these were able to run on dated hardware.

I really wish the people who welcome Gates' generosity would think of the millions of institutions and governments who had to choose Microsoft to show off for Western countries and the companies who were extortioned by the Microsoft-funded BSA. For many of us, Microsoft was the East India Company of the modern world.

As I understand it, San Francisco reportedly has an even worse problem than Seattle with drug addiction and homelessness, despite more/higher taxes across the board. Therefore, it is not clear that taxes alone will fix this problem; in fact, by purely looking at the data here on the west coast, it would appear higher taxes correlates with worse problems of this sort.

Note that I'm obviously not claiming that higher taxes necessarily cause worse problems, but a negative correlation like this is strong evidence against any claims for a positive causation of (higher taxes -> less homelessness and drug addiction).

There have been many articles and studies written elsewhere on drug addiction and homelessness, so I won't repeat the details -- but my understanding is that the general consensus is that solving this requires policy change more so than funding change (but obviously both are necessary for the best results).

Please explain how lack of state income tax has anything to do with this problem or vis versa, how the state income tax revenue would actually contribute to fixing this problem? There are states with state income tax that has the same problem as Washington like California for an example.

More taxes does not automatically mean they go into fixing the core of the problem nor does it mean they'd fund the mental health program enough to address most of the problems.

Mental health is not a single cause of the homelessness problem that is "infecting" the west coast right now. For an example, medical bills could easily and have bankrupted people without actual mental problems. So, how would funding mental health facilities going to help these people have a home?

You are not wrong about the mental health issue but the idea that an income tax will fix the issue is flawed. Just look at Oregon.

Mental health support will be provided when it is actually a priority. It clearly isn't for most of the state.

Seattle is an unfortunate perfect storm of issues due to rapid growth.

San Francisco, LA, and Portland have similar problems, despite having access to income tax dollars.

Seattle is suffering from self inflicted wounds.

The homeless crisis has nothing to do with cost of living (example, look at other extremely expensive cities around the world).

It’s because we took all of the mentally ill and drug addicted out of psychiatric asylums and threw them on the streets.

Do any states fund that any more? Parts of LA look like scenes from the walking dead as well and taxes are higher. Not much is spent effectively on solving the problem however.

Sorry but Seattle's homeless issues are caused by poor city government and the ideologically skewed policies that are in place. Most homeless people are mostly from outside Seattle, not here. Most live permanently nomadic lifestyles, and many are drug addicts. I don't believe the claim that most homeless in the Seattle area are locals, since every single one I've ever spoken to has told me they are not from Washington. Similarly, when Seattle news crews interview homeless, they always proudly state that they came here from another state because they are welcomed here. The "point in time" survey that claims most homeless in Seattle are from the area is not rigorous because it relies on self-reporting (not verified background data), and local activists/organizations coach the homeless to claim they are long time locals on the survey to solicit sympathy and financial support.

The reason why Seattle attracts permanent nomads and drug addicts is simple. The city simply does not enforce laws and lets them do whatever they want. Even worse, it selectively enforces laws - if you are a law-abiding resident, you will be subject to the law in situations like parking enforcement, littering, environmental laws, and so on. For example, a car cannot be parked in a public parking spot for more than 72 hours and if you or I were to leave a car parked for that long, we'd have a ticket. Littering anywhere carries serious fines. And homeowners have to deal with a draconian set of codes that govern their ability to use property they own and pay property taxes on. But if you are homeless, you can get away with parking RVs permanently in public spots (taking away street parking from actual residents), you can trash up public and private lands, and you can leave needles/feces/trash in wetlands/greenbelts/wherever without consequence. Here's an example of differential enforcement of laws in Seattle, where a construction worker living in an RV was fined while other nearby RVs for "homeless" were not fined: https://mynorthwest.com/1046331/construction-worker-rv-ticke...

No one has a right to live wherever they want, at whatever price point they want, doing whatever job they want (or not working at all), and so on. People have to show personal responsibility for their choices (for example not trying that first hit of heroin), live within their means (instead of expecting to live in a highly-desirable and expensive location), and obey the laws (in support of the social contract). Taxing Seattle or Washington residents to support the lifestyles of those who don't do these things is punishing residents who play by the rules for those who don't. Instead, the city government needs to enforce the law strictly, and create conditions/consequences that disincentivize people from abusing the city's goodwill.