So you want to tax the rich? OK, let's start with Harvard

However I thought that it is not just that religions are not taxed, but rather that non-profits are not taxed and religions are just a special type of non-profit.

on edit: wrote it's instead of its.

It's a subtle difference. Churchgoers don't get a free pass to break the law. The establishment simply is immune to regulation of any kind attempted to be placed upon the organization itself by congress.

Often this means that not only are they the official church, but that tax money is actually used to support them -- even tax money from people who don't belong to that church.

The Founders did not like paying taxes to churches they didn't belong to, and who can blame them for that?

Also interestingly, at the time the Constitution was enacted, some of the states did have established churches. The Constitution didn't do anything about that, as it only affected the Federal government.

The First Amendment has since been "incorporated" (by means of the Fourteenth Amendment) in such a way that states are also prohibited from establishing churches nowadays.

Yep.

Quote: if at age 20 you are not a socialist you do not have a heart. If at age 30 you are not a capitalist, you do not have a brain.

I meant cumulatively. If you own 200 things worth 10 000 usd each you should still pay 5% for 100 of them.

> Home ownership is living.

If you really need to live in a million dollar house you should be able to pay for it. It's not living it's luxury.

Except they can't, because (barring artificial price ceilings like rent control) they're almost certainly already charging the optimal rent for maximum profit; if they could actually charge higher without losing money as a result, they already would have, property tax or no.

The actual reason property tax increases rental prices is because it penalizes development, meaning developers are less likely to build denser housing, meaning less housing supply, meaning higher housing prices. That is what is happening when landlords hike up prices in response to property tax increases; they are responding to the shifting intersection of supply and demand.

Replacing property tax (and every other tax, for that matter, but that's a good starting point) with a land value tax would alleviate this problem, since it inverts the penalties - namely, by penalizing those who don't develop, meaning developers are more likely to build denser housing, meaning more housing supply, meaning lower housing prices. In this case, landlords are locked in; they still have to respond to the shifting intersection of supply and demand in order to maximize profit, and in this case that intersection results in a lower optimal price point. Literally zero opportunity to price LVT into apartment rentals this way; any attempt to do so results in the landlord losing profit.

Is it doing anything useful while it's there? This trickle-down bullshit is at this point completely debunked, right?

What about downsides of the capital being there (like lobbying politics to introduce economic policies that harm majority of citizens)?

If the balance effect of it leaving is positive (and I think there's a good chance it is) - I say good riddance :)

Think of 66% VAT applied to all products. Suddenly, repairing and extending lifetime of existing stuff becomes economically viable.

I think sales taxes are also easy to get around. At least in the UK, businesses don't pay VAT, and many large purchases are made by companies. Happens in all sorts of ways, but even things like people who do a little bit of contracting work buying expensive laptops with their "business" and bypassing 20% tax. Technically ok, but often not in the spirit of the law when they're buying almost exclusively for personal use.

Sales taxes are among the most inefficient taxes in existence.

I am in favor of higher taxes but taxes should be evaluated based on there influence on the market and there efficiency. Sales tax scores poor in both categories. Im a fan of the MMT since they propose another thinking about taxes.

It's a bit similar to how the car industry introduced gimped, ugly, overpriced electric vehicles to "prove" the public doesn't want them. The same principle - badly thought out wealth taxes in return for nothing - just to prove the public dislikes them. Malicious compliance on political level. Nothing unites mainstream political parties as much as the dislike for taxing wealth.

(1) proposals like radical markets wealth tax create an uncheatable system

Which is a shame, since it's about as ideal of a tax as you can get:

- You can't move land to an offshore account

- LVT penalizes land speculation, which is one of the main drivers of suburban sprawl and rising housing costs

- It targets the rich, and marginally (if at all) impacts the lower and middle classes (replacing all taxes with LVT would almost certainly reduce middle class tax burdens and entirely eliminate lower class tax burdens)

- All economic activities ultimately depend on land in some way, so instead of taxing (and thus suppressing) those economic activities, it's ultimately more economically efficient to tax land itself

- The aforementioned economic activities can't readily price LVT into their own prices for goods and services, specifically because land value itself is a function of the goods and services that land enables, and because if those goods and services could actually fetch a higher price without reducing profitability (per supply v. demand), then they would almost certainly already be priced accordingly, regardless of LVT

And this is just from physical land in the commonly-understood sense (i.e. some chunk of the surface area of the oblate spheroid we call Earth). There are myriad other sorts of things with the same characteristics as land; everything from geostationary orbits to intellectual property to radio spectra to IP addresses (and just about anything else with an inelastic supply) represents economic rent waiting to be collected.

Here's an example: Sales tax of 10%, poor person has an income of $1000 per month and spends it all. 10%/$100 of income goes to tax.

Rich person has an income of $10000 per month. They spends $5000 and save $5000. 5%/$500 of income goes to tax. That's like a reverse progressive income, arguably very disadvantageous for the poor.

Why isn't this a problem in countries that already tax wealth, like France or Norway?

In terms of asset changes, I don’t think this is true, hard to value assets generally have poor returns and definitionally have poor liquidity (which is why they are hard to value!). I’d rather have stock market returns and pay 3% of assets then have something exotic that I can’t sell.

At the same time, I do support progressive (and at the high end very high) estate tax.

That’s because people in practice don’t do the “and also” part, but instead do something like the tax-the-rich theater of “‘taxing the rich’ via progressive income taxes, but making capital gains taxed at a lower top marginal rate with a less-progressive structure and labor income subject to special additional taxes.”

Because, in practice, the wealthy write the laws, and use control of the mechanisms of mass communication to focus attention on the parts that sound good favorable to the common man (progressive structure) and then distract from the impact of the bits that let the rich off and soak the working and middle class (preferential treatment of capital, gifts, and inheritances and anti-preferential treatment of labor income.)

Hence my focus and the “and also” bits that need to be part of a progressive income tax system for it to work properly.

Tax things with inelastic supply that rich people and large corporations are more likely to hoard. Land in particular is about ideal for this.