Standard wealth taxes are easy to avoid and have weird effects - but land value tax would probably be great. Unfortunately, people tend to vote against it.
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.
The lower class still live somewhere. If you go to a land tax, their landlord isn't going to just eat that. It will be passed on to the renters.
- 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
Here's a software-only startup that works fully remote. How does that economic activity depend on land? It doesn't, except for the workers' living places. But they'd still have living places even if they were unemployed.
But I kind of agree with your last paragraph. If you are going to go with a "land use" tax, well, Google owns some buildings with servers in them, but the most valuable thing they own is google.com.
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.
Also the avoidance on things like laptops might be small, but they typically can't be done by the people at the bottom end of the income spectrum.
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
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.
Think of 66% VAT applied to all products. Suddenly, repairing and extending lifetime of existing stuff becomes economically viable.
One of the most reasonable proposals for UBI is to finance it through VAT. Some 15 years ago there was a party in Belgium that lobbied for UBI and they calculated that VAT should increase from 21% to 33% to finance UBI.
Edit: I guess that if you're paying a salary to someone in your household staff who can repare the smartphone you only need to buy (and pay VAT on) the replacement glass. But I don't think this is what you meant. I think that you just don't understand how VAT works. If you bring your phone to a repair shop in Belgium the 21% VAT will be applied on the whole bill, parts and labour.
In a country with 21% VAT, the supplier will be paid 60,50€, and the end client will have to pay 121€ for the repair.
The repair shop now owes 21 - 10,50 = 10,50€ in VAT to the tax authorities.
But the repair shop still has 50€!
Assuming we are in Belgium and all of the benefit is used to pay the salary, we will deduce 22% social security tax, then the repairer will have to pay his 50% income tax, so at the end the repairer receives around 20€ in net pay.
I am simplifying to the extreme in the hope that you get the idea.
You may be tempted to say that the end client paid 121€ from his salary, and 21€ is actually the tax. But this is the whole point! He will be more likely to pay 21€ VAT on the repair rather than 120€ VAT on a new iPhone. And repair shops there will be.
If
a) the customer pays 100+tax for the repair (which includes in this very simplified model 50+tax for the supplies and 50+tax for the value added by the repair shop)
and
b) the tax goes from 21% to 66%
then
c) the customer will pay 166 for the repair instead of 121.
That's what I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26967392
I don't see how "work will be relatively cheaper". The VAT applies to everything.
(It's also confusing that you say that the benefit is used to pay the salaries, by the way. And if what you call "benefit" is used entirely to pay the salary then no corporate tax will be paid because the company will be losing money.)
Still, work will be cheaper compared to the price of products.
In my example, the 50€ will be used to pay the salary, and the net salary will still be 20€ while the price of the phone will increase by 21%.
Of course if the price of the new phone before tax is higher than the price of the repair before tax the same will be true after tax.
And if the price of the phone is 200 and the price of the repair is half of that it will still be half of the price of the phone after tax. But if taxes are 0% it's either 200 or 100 for the repair and if taxes are 900% it's either 2000 or 1000 for the repair. The repair may be prefered if you cannot afford the difference but it will still be half the price of the new phone.
That's 66% more on a massive chunk of lower and middle class spending. I can think of few things more hostile to the working class than some regressive tax like VAT.
This exacerbates the already existing "poor tax".