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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Taxes go up? Eventually I suppose.

Probably, but by far the most likely scenario is a decade or more of persistently high inflation as bondholders (i.e. your pensions and retirement accounts) and normal people are pick-pocketed to bring down the nominal debt load.

Inflation just is another form of tax that’s almost uniformly flat.

(Actually it affects those who hold cash and cash-nominated things more than those who mainly hold debt)

It definitely hurts those who hold debt. Maybe you're thinking of borrowers? Certainly debt holders are very damaged by inflation, too. Especially long term debt holders (such as the previously mentioned pensions/retirement accounts).

If you have a 30 year bond paying 2% and inflation goes up to 4%, you're making -2% on your bond. Sure, that's not as bad as -4% for cash holders. But it's not good at all if you're planning to retire someday as the compounding effects of inflation over the decades wipe out your retirement benefits.

Also the impact could be more immediate if you need the principal. As now your debt is worth lot less if you sell it. See the last years bank failures...

I should have worded that better - by "hold debt" I mean people who are paying the debts, especially things like fixed rate mortgages.

If you borrowed $500k to buy your house at 3% and we hit 10% inflation, you look like a financial wizard pretty fast.

If you bought non-TIPS bonds during that time to finance your retirement, you may end up nearly destitute.

It does have an unlimited right to tax.

Investors know that there is more than enough private wealth and assets here to pay off everything if we ever got around to it. The needful.

Investors also know they'll be among the first the government calls upon to foot the bill.

Capital gains and unrealized gains taxes are among the increases the current administration is pitching (the unrealized gains is technically more of an advance than an increase, but because it is owed before it is realized, it will feel like an increase).

Add to that the perennial desire to increase corporate taxes (again, directly affecting investors) and it's probably safe to say that if you're an investor, you are the last person to feel good about the prospect of a fire sale shoring up the government.

Those poor investors. Sad! /s

Tax rates are incredibly low. Investors should be happy the free for all lasted as long as it did.

Total wealth held by US billionaires is only 4.5 trillion. US owes like 34 trillion. Not sure sending the billionaires to 0 and the resulting economic collapse gets us where we need to go.

And US real estate holdings by everyone (all entities) are $119 trillion

there is a lot of privately held notional value here. we can go back to doing in-kind tax payments, cattle and land, and to the tax authority, if it came to that. some austerity measure in the future.

a lot of countries don't have this quirk where the government owns a lot, earns a lot, has natural resources, as well as privately held holdings that eclipse all of it

May I humbly suggest that we start taxing the land value?

How about we just cut spending? We already do tax the land value, we pay property taxes.

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