Turns Out Americans Actually Do Want to Tax the Rich

[Anonymous]

And I didn't say it was my top priority. Just listed 2 examples that would benefit middle class people like someone asked for

[Anonymous]

It's a dumb idea, if for no other reason than the administrative problems involved.
Essentially - she wants to tax assets, not income.

The Problems with Warren’s Solution

Instead of fixing the income tax system that we already have, Senator Warren’s proposal would leave our broken income tax in place while layering on an entirely new and unwieldy wealth tax regime. There are two reasons why this decision is unwise.

First, a wealth tax would be an administrative nightmare. It would require us to calculate the value of a household’s assets year in and year out — which may be easy for publicly traded stocks with daily price quotes, but is much harder for illiquid assets like real estate or stakes in privately held companies. For example, how much are shares in the ride-sharing service Lyft worth? The company’s underwriters value the company at somewhere between $18 billion and $30 billion — a rather wide range. With other assets like fine art (remember, we’re talking about the super-rich here), valuations are even less certain: works sometimes sell at auction for less than their pre-sale estimates and sometimes for fourfold more.

Warren says that she would ensure proper enforcement of her wealth tax by hiring more IRS employees and conducting more audits. But valuation problems won’t be solved by more manpower. In many instances, there is no one “right” answer to the question of how much an asset is worth, no matter how many people we throw at the problem. Wealthy taxpayers will likely pick a low-end figure, and it will be impossible for the IRS to prove that they are wrong.

Second, even if Warren’s proposal passes Congress, there is a good chance it will be struck down by the courts. The Constitution says that “direct taxes” must be apportioned among the states on the basis of population. In other words, if 12% of the population lives in California, then only 12% of revenues from a “direct tax” can be raised from California — no more, no less. Warren’s proposal would generate more revenue per capita from richer states like Maryland and New Jersey than from poorer states like Mississippi and West Virginia, so it would clearly flunk the apportionment test.

http://time.com/5516903/elizabeth-warren-wealth-tax-income-assets/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pre-K isn't about people who can afford daycare getting someone else to pay for it. It's about reducing inequality of opportunity so kids don't arrive to kindergarten already behind their peers

This is such BS. We have had HeadStart for years in this country. And, guess what studies show?

POLITICIANS AND policymakers have been arguing about whether Head Start works ever since the federally funded early childhood education program for low-income families began in the 1960s. And yet, 50 years later, after more than 30 million children have been through the program, a new research report from a unit of the U.S. Department of Education concludes that we still don't have much rigorous research evidence to show that Head Start is effective in preparing children for elementary school.

The July 2015 report from the What Works Clearinghouse describes how it reviewed 90 widely different studies on Head Start. Some looked at whether Head Start improves family health, for example; others at childhood obesity. Fewer than half the studies had conducted original research that assessed whether students' academic and behavioral skills had improved.

Only one of these studies passed scientific muster, and it showed rather disappointing results. It found that Head Start had "potentially positive effects" on general reading achievement and "no discernible effects" on mathematics achievement and social-emotional development for 3-year-old and 4-year-old children.

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/08/03/report-scant-scientific-evidence-for-head-start-programs-effectiveness

[Anonymous]

Yeah, she wants to tax wealth! Not dumb at all. Easier than taxing income. No complicated tax rules for deductions needed.

Yes people can try to hide their wealth, but this is already illegal so good if we can catch more people doing it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pre-K isn't about people who can afford daycare getting someone else to pay for it. It's about reducing inequality of opportunity so kids don't arrive to kindergarten already behind their peers

They can catch up in K.

When I was growing up, we didn't have ESOL. New immigrant children who didn't speak a word of English were thrown in with everyone else. Within six months they were speaking the language and right on course with everyone else.

- someone whose grandmother came here at age 11 speaking only Yiddish, thrown into the public school, and graduated 8th grade two years later in the #1 slot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pre-K isn't about people who can afford daycare getting someone else to pay for it. It's about reducing inequality of opportunity so kids don't arrive to kindergarten already behind their peers

This is such BS. We have had HeadStart for years in this country. And, guess what studies show?

POLITICIANS AND policymakers have been arguing about whether Head Start works ever since the federally funded early childhood education program for low-income families began in the 1960s. And yet, 50 years later, after more than 30 million children have been through the program, a new research report from a unit of the U.S. Department of Education concludes that we still don't have much rigorous research evidence to show that Head Start is effective in preparing children for elementary school.

The July 2015 report from the What Works Clearinghouse describes how it reviewed 90 widely different studies on Head Start. Some looked at whether Head Start improves family health, for example; others at childhood obesity. Fewer than half the studies had conducted original research that assessed whether students' academic and behavioral skills had improved.

Only one of these studies passed scientific muster, and it showed rather disappointing results. It found that Head Start had "potentially positive effects" on general reading achievement and "no discernible effects" on mathematics achievement and social-emotional development for 3-year-old and 4-year-old children.

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/08/03/report-scant-scientific-evidence-for-head-start-programs-effectiveness

Exactly! They just want pre-K because it will reduce the number of years they have to pay for day care from 4 to 3. Why should other people have to pay your babysitting expenses?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Tell us how taking more money from people who are wealthy will make you more wealthy.
How will taxing the wealthy solve the problem of income inequality.

It's about investing strategically. Spending money keeping your population healthy and/or educated will make them more productive in the long term. Meanwhile, I pretty much guarantee that billionaires will be willing to do the same amount of work for $100 million personal profit as they would for $1 billion personal profit. Their productivity will not decrease noticeably. There may be something of a reduction in right-wing political think tank funding and political ad spending. But I think that's worth the trade-off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, she wants to tax wealth! Not dumb at all. Easier than taxing income. No complicated tax rules for deductions needed.

Yes people can try to hide their wealth, but this is already illegal so good if we can catch more people doing it

+1 Inequality is rising sharply in the US. One can tax wealth without the negative productivity effects of taxing income.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, she wants to tax wealth! Not dumb at all. Easier than taxing income. No complicated tax rules for deductions needed.

Yes people can try to hide their wealth, but this is already illegal so good if we can catch more people doing it

You are so, so naive.
Taxing assets is far more challenging than taxing income.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tell us how taking more money from people who are wealthy will make you more wealthy.
How will taxing the wealthy solve the problem of income inequality.

It's about investing strategically. Spending money keeping your population healthy and/or educated will make them more productive in the long term. Meanwhile, I pretty much guarantee that billionaires will be willing to do the same amount of work for $100 million personal profit as they would for $1 billion personal profit. Their productivity will not decrease noticeably. There may be something of a reduction in right-wing political think tank funding and political ad spending. But I think that's worth the trade-off.

These numbers are ridiculously high. Increase taxes on families earning $500k and up.

[Anonymous]

When people say that taxing the ultra-rich won't generate much money, I don't think they appreciate just how much money is tied up in a few hands. You have something like 16,000 households in the U.S. that tie up something like 8-10% of the country's total wealth. Those are the people you target.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, she wants to tax wealth! Not dumb at all. Easier than taxing income. No complicated tax rules for deductions needed.

Yes people can try to hide their wealth, but this is already illegal so good if we can catch more people doing it

You are so, so naive.
Taxing assets is far more challenging than taxing income.

Please cure me of my ignorance then

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:When people say that taxing the ultra-rich won't generate much money, I don't think they appreciate just how much money is tied up in a few hands. You have something like 16,000 households in the U.S. that tie up something like 8-10% of the country's total wealth. Those are the people you target.

Following up to add, this would be the top 0.01% -- to qualify, the households have in excess of $100 million and have annual incomes in excess of $7 million per year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, she wants to tax wealth! Not dumb at all. Easier than taxing income. No complicated tax rules for deductions needed.

Yes people can try to hide their wealth, but this is already illegal so good if we can catch more people doing it

You are so, so naive.
Taxing assets is far more challenging than taxing income.

Please cure me of my ignorance then

Haha, me too. In my ignorance, I thought taxes on property had been a thing since the founding of the Republic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, she wants to tax wealth! Not dumb at all. Easier than taxing income. No complicated tax rules for deductions needed.

Yes people can try to hide their wealth, but this is already illegal so good if we can catch more people doing it

You are so, so naive.
Taxing assets is far more challenging than taxing income.

Please cure me of my ignorance then

WaPo. One day ago.

Consumption taxes such as sales or value-added taxes are easy to administer and raise lots of revenue. Income taxes are trickier but still simple compared with taxing wealth. Most people regularly receive payments that are easy to track and can be valued at .?.?. the sum of the payments. But what is the value of a business with one shareholder? A large piece of timberland that hasn’t been sold for 50 years? An irreplaceable antique or artwork?

Taxing those things means creating a lot of administrative capacity to track and price the assets, with the wealthy and their lawyers fighting every step of the way. That’s one reason wealth taxes, once popular among Western nations, are trending toward extinction; the paltry revenue wasn’t worth the administrative headache. Nor the capital flight and slower rate of capital formation such taxes tend to induce.

Those problems would be particularly acute with Warren’s plan because she has targeted the very wealthy rather than the merely affluent. Doing so mitigates the inevitable wailing about family-owned farms, as well as some of the pressure to lard the tax with those revenue-depleting exemptions. But taxing only the super-rich means taxing people with a lot of unique, hard-to-value assets, and who can confound auditors by shifting their wealth into even more of those assets.

And these are the minor problems with the Warren plan. The big problem is Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which forbids “direct taxes” on people or property unless they’re “apportioned” — doled out among the states by population.

Instituting an income tax required a constitutional amendment to override that clause, and Warren’s plan might well require another. Warren’s team, and many other progressives, have offered ingenious arguments for the plan’s constitutionality. Probably not clever enough, however, to sway a conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warrens-wealth-tax-is-no-way-to-run-government--but-a-good-way-to-run-a-campaign/2019/01/29/6faeeeb4-2411-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html?utm_term=.f0c3cfa809a8