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Comment by chromatin | Hacker News Reader

I pay zero percent on my wealth, just like you. You should consider revising your comment as you were duped by poor journalism.

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I'll admit, I read it as income. But it does make me start to think about the disparities in how wealth is generated across different classes of Americans. For me, wealth is almost 100% generated by my income, so I would say my income tax is basically a wealth tax.

> so I would say my income tax is basically a wealth tax.

Indeed, sounds like a great reason to abolish the income tax.

You could calculate your income tax to wealth ratio though right?

The reason it’s important is that these executives are not paid “income”. Their wealth increases because it’s largely in shares of their companies and then they use non (or low) taxable events to get cash to buy their stuff.

This sort of activity is not available to people whose only source of cash is income.

I’m not sure it’s worth the unintended consequences of changing the tax laws to change this but it’s not poor journalism to point it out and start the conversation.

Edit: I just calculated mine and depending on how you value my home it’s between 5-9% for 2020.

From my point of view, it is poor journalism to use a clickbait headline ($13.6 billion is not little-to-nothing) and misleading presentation of data (incomes taxes of X on wealth of Y).

It's also lazy journalism as it just piggy-backs on top of the illegally-obtained IRS data from ProPublica, and produces all of its quotes from Twitter or other news media sources.

Do you not consider property tax a wealth tax?

I don't. Property that is held (which can be held in a variety of ways by a plethora of entities) is targeted separately, just as income is, just as capital gains are, which property can also generate.

Real property (houses, land, etc) derive much of their value from the surrounding context - roads, population, jobs, etc. these are paid for collectively, so a property tax to me is more like HOA dues to the city/county that help make it livable.

However, if the property tax is higher than those infra needs, then a portion of it is totally a wealth tax. Just haven’t seen that in CA.

Property tax is more of a use tax e.g. a tax on imputed rent, not a wealth tax.

If it was a wealth tax, you would be able to deduct your liabilities i.e. the mortgage.

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