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Comment by sumuyuda | Hacker News Reader

They exploit tax loopholes and pay less tax than the average worker.

No, they don't. They might pay a smaller percentage in some cases, but it's definitely not universal.

So that abstract debt scales linearly with income? Why should a programmer that made his wealth from selling an app on the internet owe more than a truck driver?

Wouldn't it be more reasonable to tax consumption according to its cost and effect on the society, rather than income?

Wealth above $50M or so is generally not useful for consumption -- your second private jet and your 7th house add very little marginal utility.

What great wealth is useful for is power & status. But you often don't consume wealth to gain power & status -- spending $44B on Twitter isn't consumption.

The best way to tax the wealthy is to tax wealth, not consumption nor income.

Private jets are usually bought through air operator companies that use them to do business - that's not consumption. Using the private jet is a service and that's consumption, so that should be fairly taxed. 7th house, if not used to do business, is consumption too - so again, that should be fairly taxed.

I don't know what "marginal utility" even means, who determines it and based on what objective facts, and I don't think it's relevant anyways - taxes should be payments of the debt to the society, debt is not determined by utility in any way.

Buying a company is investment, not consumption - so yeah, that shouldn't be taxed. I don't care about "the best way to tax the wealthy", I care about a fair way to pay for what society provided. If the society didn't provide to the wealthy more than it provided to the not-wealthy, it's not fair to demand more.

> taxes should be payments of the debt to the society, debt is not determined by utility in any way.

Yes, exactly. Consumption taxes are a tax on utility. The wealthy owe their wealth to society. Their debt is relative to their wealth, not their consumption.

No, that doesn't make any sense. Nobody owes their wealth to anybody. People should pay for what they use/cause, not just because they exist. Consumption taxes are not taxing utility, they are taxing consumption - it's a very direct relationship of usage->payment, regardless of whether it was completely useless, for laughs, or helped something. Again, how do you even objectively determine utility? Is having fun enough to claim utility? What if we rephrase it as "mental health"?

If I can make my wealth without causing any effect on society, there's no reason my debt should increase - my debt doesn't scale linearly with my wealth, it scales with whatever the society provided to me.

If I make my wealth by selling an app on the internet, there's no reason I should pay as much as someone who polluted the environment in the process by shipping stuff all around the world and used fossil fuels to make the products.

And if I make my wealth by selling stuff in Europe, there's no reason it should be taxed in US just because I live there. At the very least, it should be taxed at the place where the society actually provided something that led to earning it. Because otherwise I'd just move to a nice tropical island with no wealth tax.

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