Jeff Bezos would owe $2B a year in state taxes if Washington passes wealth tax | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos would owe $2B a year in state taxes if Washington passes wealth tax

cnbc.com

14 pointspseudolus16 comments

The logic of federal wealth tax is that you can't really move away from them - you're taxed on exit, not to mention access to USA.

Washington state wealth tax can be modeled similarly.

The point of wealth tax is not even to get to equality - even if cutoff is on 1 billion, this level is still very different from the average. The point is that most - all? - billionaires grow their wealth faster than 1%, so wealth tax is just another tax - which still allow billionaires get richer.

$2B over 10 years would be 1/10th his wealth. Why put up with that?

Bezos should put $1B to a WA referendum to adopt an income tax. Win that war and make WA better or be reviled so much they want you out.

Because that money is sitting there idle otherwise, stagnating the economy. Money is made to be spent. Hoarding it is antisocial behavior given that personal needs have been met.

It sounds like you don't know how wealth works. This is a tax on assets. Bezos wealth is from the fact that he owns a large amount of Amazon stock. It's paper wealth. He would have to sell his Amazon stock to get the money. It's not cash sitting in a bank account.

Sell it, or loan it out. There are numerous ways to (temporarily) convert financial assets to cash without just selling them. That could be used to invest in the local economy, for example, but again to my point, it's not. And all of that is moot anyway because for ordinary citizens, your income is taxed based on your total assets (including stock), not just on your actual cash money that you receive each year.

No he wouldn't. He would move.

At a certain point though, it becomes cheaper to just pay the wealth tax than to move your hundred-billion-dollar company headquarters from state to state to state as more states adopt this policy.

It isn't a corporation tax, it's a personal wealth tax on non-tangible financial assets. He doesn't need to move his HQ, just himself. I'm pretty sure he can find a U-Haul for under 2 billion dollars, and according to the article, the State of Washington apparently believes he, or some others like him, will.

If you want to build your multi billion dollar company, you should probably be in the state it’s based in for a significant chunk of the year. He and other hundred-billionaires usually have a reason for living where they live instead of being, say, based on a yacht in the Atlantic.

I worked at a company that relocated their official headquarters twice in a span of a few years.

From an employee perspective, nothing really changed. We already had offices in multiple states and countries, and we already routinely worked remotely across offices.

The location of the company's headquarters was more of an abstract notion. Moving it is trivial.

The only real exception is when bills try to tax anyone who spends a certain number of days in a state. California had a proposal to tax anyone who spent more than 60 days per year in California. The end result wouldn't be an increase in tax revenue. Instead, wealthy people would simply avoid traveling to California any more than absolutely necessary.

There is nothing particularly different about California’s desires from a taxation perspective. Any other state would eventually make the same decision. The bottom line is if a state is housing a 12-figure individual or company and sustaining the related damage associated with social wealth disparity as a result, they will want to recoup the damages in the form of taxes. These taxes are nothing but a band-aid over our culture of private wealth. If we didn’t have the latter, we wouldn’t need the former.

Or you make the HQ virtual/remote and move the address on a whim, perhaps even automatically several times per month. Or you move it completely out of the country.

I don't believe all states are so anti-business.

Good luck doing that with Amazon. You have to have a physical headquarters somewhere, and moving it out of the country has its own costs such as import taxes.

I don't know why everyone is so insistent that moving is the only possible result of laws like this. Fortunately taxes do work, or we wouldn't have anything resembling the infrastructure we have in modern Western society. Taxes are a technology like any other.

Amazon in Europe moved their headquarters to another country (Luxembourg) to get a special tax deal. Took 2 years but the tax benefit was worth it.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-amazon-taxavoidance-id...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/18/revealed-...

Taxes work, too much taxes don't. This is getting into the "too much" territory.

I'm very sure that any country a billionaire like this would choose would not have import taxes, or that exception could be made for the privilege of having him.

2 billion is 1% of Jeff Bezos’ net worth. Most Americans pay far larger a percentage of that each year in taxes.

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