1. The US didn't have a "wealth tax" in the 1950s, it had a very high marginal income tax rate which applied to a tiny slice of earners.
2. A wealth tax would be hard / impossible to implement.
2. A wealth tax would be hard / impossible to implement.
The net effect was the same. Putting an effective cap on income throttles wealth inequality growth.
>A wealth tax would be hard / impossible to implement
It absolutely would be. Any political effort to do so would be sabotaged every step of the way by institutions dedicated to protecting enormous agglomerations of private wealth.
Moreover, closer it got to the finish line the more willing American oligarchs would be to flirt with political violence and ally with and organize the underlying, disorganized currents of fascism in order to keep their wealth.
This is a path we've been along before, almost 100 years ago.
However, the US middle class was more willing to organize and fight to protect its interests back then. There were actual communists among them and the US government was legitimately afraid enough to kowtow to their demands every so often. Not any more.
It’s also operationally almost impossible to implement, as what counts as ‘wealth’ is highly ambiguous, and in most cases valuing it even in the best situation is nearly impossible. In a taxation situation even more so because it isn’t changing control between disinterested parties, so there is no one who has the time to really look at and form their own opinion and holding anyone accountable to it on a short timeframe.
A lot of the trump real estate scandals are from him (supposedly) manipulating real estate appraisals for favorable loan and tax purposes, and that is for something with relatively easy/straightforward/understood valuation and an army of appraisers.
Private equity? Partnerships in ongoing concerns? Controlling vs non-controlling interests in various things? Trusts?
There are so many valid ways to look at, account for, and structure these - and they all have wildly different values, levers to change those values, and short or long term valuations and cash flows. If you own a controlling interest in a large business, but don’t sell anything and don’t have income from it (you reinvest it in the business), that may or may not be a lot of wealth. If the business tanks without it, was the business worth anything? Or was it worth something and then it was another factor that killed it? If the business is producing a lot of cash and the owner pulls it out, that is clear measurable income and easy to quantity.
To the point if you threw 5 independent evaluators at any of them you’re probably going to get 7 different actual numbers, all meaningfully different, and all of which could be argued are legitimate.
If the wealth tax goes after real estate, folks just won’t put their name on it directly and voila, good luck.
This is also despite those alleged shenanigans being hamhanded and pretty obviously done and by probably the most well know and controversial ‘wealthy person’ in current society, enforcement still not only didn’t work, it still hasn’t actually been enforced. And is surrounded by massive controversy and legal BS and will probably drag on for another decade.
It’s like pointing to OJ Simpson’s murder trial as an example of swift and non-controversial justice that supports your legal policy?
Therefore, a wealth tax would either raise money or discourage a form a fraud. It's a win either way.
The "impossible to do" is a common excuse for people just not wanting to do something.
The common excuse is that the ultra wealthy aren't actually cash wealthy. They have all their wealth in investments that are rarely if ever actually realized. People throw their hands up in the air and say we can't tax unrealized wealth. But how do wealthy people get cash? They borrow millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions against their unrealized wealth. So limit or tax their borrowing of this money such that it forces the realization of wealth, which would be taxed, or they are taxed on what they borrow, respectively.
Interesting idea. We sort of already do this, we apply property taxes based on the value of the property as pegged at purchase (re-assessed over time). We could exempt loans on collateral already subject to property (or other value-based) taxes, but could then put a wealth tax on any other asset used as collateral for a loan at the collateral value agreed on by the lender.
If you do not recognize unrealized losses, it strongly biases investment toward low-risk rent-seeking investments because the expected return is much higher than long-term high-risk investments under this tax regime. Startups, biotech, etc become unattractive as a place to put money because the financials don't make sense relative to rent-seeking and investment is not a charity. Paying taxes on non-liquid assets is a massive risk for average people, greatly reducing the practical investment opportunities available to them.
If you do properly recognize unrealized losses, it creates a scalable new mechanism for tax avoidance that would reduce tax revenues. Not only are valuations strictly notional and effectively fictional for many assets, but intangibles are often entangled in asset values that can't be accounted for in a sane way (e.g. the act of transferring an asset can greatly reduce its value ipso facto). These intrinsic logical inconsistencies allow almost any tax story to be constructed using assets.
While no government wants to deal with the consequences of broadly recognizing unrealized losses, they also don't want to incentivize all investment to go into low-risk rent-seeking endeavors like real estate instead of long-term high-risk investments in technology and innovation. It is a damned if you do, damned if you don't, so governments generally opt out of this type of tax altogether.
The wealth inequality problem in the U.S. is INSANE. If the U.S. had a population of just 10,000,000, literally 12 people would have as much wealth as the bottom 60%, i.e., 6,000,000 people, combined. And yet, here we are talking about how "impossible" it is to simply tax wealthy people.
These systems were made by humans. They can be fixed. Wealth inequality and taxation of the wealthy are not laws of nature that can't be changed.
What do you think property taxes are?
I agree it would be really hard to tax all forms of wealth. But I'm fine with rich people hiding their wealth in artwork or stamps or whatever to save it from taxation. Keeps the money out of useful assets like stocks and houses.
How does stock have utility anything like housing?
If you are purely an investor then the utility of equities vs. real estate is the same -- it is an investment.
(There is debate on this point; I personally find the side arguing that such a tax would not be barred as needing to use fairly tortured lines of reasoning to arrive at their conclusion.) If you can’t pass a wealth tax federally, then whatever state wanted to compete on having a low/zero wealth tax would find plenty of wealthy takers as residents.
Property taxes are a common type of use tax.
This is the standard excuse for stopping any thoughts of changes in the US. Let's not even think about improvements because they are impossible anyway. A sane health care system is impossible, doing something about rising wealth inequality isn't possible, reducing opioid deaths is impossible. The only things that seem possible are things to move even more money into the hands of wealthy people. I still remember how in 2008 Congress quickly was able to produce 750 billion when the banks and the banker's money was threatened.
So you had a strong incentive to increase salaries, hire more workers, invest in more machinery, diversify, etc. simply because getting more cash out of a business wasn't worth it
Unfortunately they focused on increasing executive salaries and forgot about the rest.