Entrepreneurs who take on risk want to keep control of the spoils, imagine that.
A millionaire's tax is the flip side of "privatize profits, socialize risks."
Privatize risk, socialize reward.
A millionaire's tax is the flip side of "privatize profits, socialize risks."
Privatize risk, socialize reward.
Let's not leave out bankruptcy protection, emergency lending, industry bailouts, disaster assistance, government procurement. Oh, and the Federal Reserve standing behind financial markets to prevent the entire credit system from falling to crap.
I'm pretty sure every entrepreneur took advantage of nearly all of these publicly paid for infrastructure to get where they are, today. There would be no spoils for Brin if not for all these things. Things that taxes provide.
Tax all of them. No one has ever earned a billion dollars.
Second, all of them.
And the idea would be to tax high net worth (HNW) individuals. Not on their salary, because part of the game is that capital is taxed less than labor, and stocks aren’t taxed until you realize a gain. So what do ultra rich folks do? They take loans against their stocks (same stocks that public sector unions use to fund their retirement pensions), and can realize just enough to pay off the loan (or roll over the loan) and they get far better interest rates on their loans than you or I do.
So we either tax them against the loans they take out against their stock, or we tax their unrealized gains at their face value, or tax those loans as income against HNW individuals.
There are several ways to ensure folks that have made billions are taxed, but right now we aren’t willing to make those policy choices to tax them — and we even give their circumstances preferential treatment, even though we’re willing to make no concessions for folks that make $30,000 a year and are fighting for their next meal.