It's strange that people always make this argument for wealth taxes, but you rarely hear it about property taxes. If "net worth is not real" neither is equity in real estate.
I think a lot of tax authorities also don't really aggressively reassess that regularly without a sale, so it also kind of ends up baked in that if you didn't pay that much for the property, it's only theoretically worth that much.
It's harder for private companies sure, but who will stand in the way of govts if they said we will sanction your if you buy X or Y company?
This entire argument doesn't really hold IMHO
The SEC exists. As do many other mechanisms by which the government regulates direct and brokered securities trades and sales. You can make the case that some of those controls are poorly/ineffectively implemented, but you can’t claim that it’s not something the government routinely regulates, intervenes in, and sometimes prohibits outright.
https://www.sec.gov/files/forms-3-4-5.pdf
Here are Musk’s. https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1494730.htm
high frequency traders dont have a right to a business model.
if they want faster trades, they can take full liability for what they own
Because the building is standing right where it is, in the open, lit by the sun every day. If you don't pay your tax, the government can just take it.
This compensates for the several philosophical and moral problems with it, and I've seen several economists declare it the best form of taxation there is.
Your comment added literally no value except to whine.
Try holding yourself to at _least_ as high of standards as you hold others. People will be less likely to think you're a worthless asshole.
If a majority stock holder in a company sells all of their stock, the price first the first share sold is likely going to be completely different (and substantially less!) than the last share sold.
Personally my favorite idea for this stuff that I have heard thrown around is to allow people to self value everything. However, that self valuation then becomes a price tag. Let a billionaire's accountants put their own evaluation on their equity in a business. But that becomes a binding offer and some other billionaire could come along and buy them out at that valuation. That creates pricing pressure in both directions, the person is prevented from underpricing their assets due to the threat of another buyer coming in and a person is prevented from overpricing because it increases their taxes. And suddenly all the problems regarding how the government appraises these things disappears.
And that ignores that it trivially enables large-scale exploitation and looting by construction.
Once again, this is simply haggling over price. Name the premium you think is justified and add that into the law.
If the owner is required to invent a fake risk premium then it virtually guarantees that the risk will be mis-priced. Forced rampant mis-pricing is an exploitable arbitrage opportunity of epic proportions. Every quant worth a damn will make a fortune looting this. No serious policy can ignore this defect. It has the additional political downside that no one can ever own anything anymore in a meaningful way, which won’t be popular.
No one takes this idea seriously because anyone with a modicum of finance math background can see that the math doesn’t math. Political ideology doesn’t even figure into it.
For example, imagine we only apply this to people with a net worth over $500B. That's literally only Elon Musk. He has plenty of money to hire his own team of quants to price his assets. We can even be generous with this law and make the purchase price double the valuation. Hell, we can even restrict it to only apply to stock of publicly traded companies so the wealth valuations are highly informed by market pricing. We can just keep adding rules like this until you're out of economic reasons for why a wealth tax and/or this form of valuation can't work. At that point the debate is lost and "we're just haggling over price" because once we apply it to Musk, how can you argue against applying it to Bezos...
This type of forced sale happens all the time with public companies. For example, only like 60% of Twitter shareholders approved the sale to Musk, but the other 40% were forced to go along with it regardless of their preference. If Musk can do that to other people, why should some hypothetically richer person not be able to do it to Musk?
And to repeat myself for a third time, we don't need to haggle over price. If we only want this to apply to billionaires, assets worth $50 million, or whatever, that's fine. If one of the people impacted truly doesn't want to sell, let them set the price as high as makes them feel safe. I'm not going to lose any sleep over taxing the emotional desires of billionaires.
They signed up to that, though. Tagalonpg/dragalong rights are priced into the share price. That's not the same thing.
It seems there are many many more people heavily invested in preventing land tax all of a sudden and are very informed whereas when that guy made a land tax visualizer a few months ago... crickets.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45425770
> but I struggle to even conceptualize what land value means
One of the first comments. Now there are dozens of people who are suddenly well versed in "georgeism"?
Another evident thing is that people will start retreating from the internet as this gets worse (With LLMs accelerating the trend).
I disagree with you on what is being drip-fed. It's factual that deranged levels of wealth inequality are causing problems, even the billionaire wannabes on HN are starting to see that.
This is circular. Wealth inequality:
1. Isn't real. It's a paper value that would not survive contact with reality.
2. Doesn't matter. What matters is the absolute level of poverty and whether that's getting better. Someone in poverty in the UK today will still get healthcare, eyecare and dental care beyond the dreams of Henry VIII.
3. Is genuinely a stupid measure. You could "fix" it by burning everyone's possessions until everyone has the same: nothing. Zero inequality, and yet somehow doesn't sound great.
> What the wealthy and powerful are funding is division, fascism, the far-right and immigrant hate, so that they don't have to pay more taxes. It's the same divide and rule playbook since forever.
This is just your media consumption showing.
And humans are wealthier than any time in history. They have access to robot slaves that can wash dishes and clothes for them. They can access fruits grown over 1000 miles away for 69c. They have potions that can cure cancer. They have the database of all human intelligence in their pocket, accessible from anywhere on the globe. They have individualized transportation that can travel over 2 miles a minute. They have super intelligent thinking machines for cents.
Life has never been better for mankind.
The last thing you should do at that point is vote for more policies that will destroy economic activity in the name of "fairness". That's how you got here.
I don't like property taxes either, and at minimum would rather they were called something else, and preferably replaced with per-service charges where possible.
But either way they exist to pay for things, and not to just degrade the value of your property simply because you worked to own it.