• Hello_there@fedia.io
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    5 months ago

    The rich pick up assets during g every crash, widening inequality. We need a wealth tax to start reversing some of those gains

      • Hello_there@fedia.io
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        5 months ago

        Wealth tax over $10M or even 100M would still do massive good. If we can hit billionaires and reinvest that in the working class, the economy is going to go crazy

        • MajinBlayze@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          My dream policy would be a wealth tax that includes company ownership that could be paid with company shares. Any shares paid this way would go to an escrow that is controlled by the employees of the company, eventually trending companies towards becoming worker coops.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The 99% don’t have any unrealized gains to begin with. Even people near the top end of that scale who do have investments have all or most of them in retirement accounts where the gains eventually get taxed as income (traditional) or not at all (Roth) instead.

        • earphone843@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          Unrealized gains means that the investment vehicle has increased in value since it was purchased, but hasn’t been sold at that value. Every type of investment is going to have either unrealized gains or losses until it’s sold.

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        5 months ago

        Yes, absolutely. Coming out of the great depression we clawed back so much, but that’s been slowly dismantled and we’re back in the roaring 20s now

        Things are more complicated now, but there’s certainly ways to do this if we have politicians who will fight to carry out our will

              • Hello_there@fedia.io
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                5 months ago

                I don’t know that I agree with the conclusions of the video. But TLDR just did a video outlining some history in UK and concluded ones off wealth taxes have worked and listed two examples

                  • Hello_there@fedia.io
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                    5 months ago

                    Do a fucking Google. It’s a news channel on YouTube. If you’re concerned about credibility, they just interviewed Keir Starmer and have been around for a few years.

          • theneverfox@pawb.social
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            5 months ago

            I mean… Fuck economic theory, the entire field is a mess of myths and narratives. There’s good work to be sure, but governments and organizations just find models that support what they want to do, no matter how much it conflicts with observations

            There’s historical examples in this country, there’s modern examples like the Scandinavian model… Wealth was redistributed, there’s

            I have no idea what you’re asking for. What even is a wealth tax “working” to you?

            I mean I could pull up some economists who go over numbers and adamantly advocate for wealth redistribution, but I feel like nothing I give you is going to actually change your mind

              • theneverfox@pawb.social
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                5 months ago

                I never said anything about income tax… But again, these are real things that we used to have and they have elsewhere:

                Tax brackets to to 90%+ on business profits - incentivize companies to reinvest in r&d while disincentiving investment

                Tax inheritance and crack down on forever trusts

                Progressively tax money moving in and out of the country, and close up tax loopholes (killing the tax filing industry would be a necessary prerequisite)

                You could even revamp capital gains and certain types of loan to somehow figure into a progressive income tax

                And most importantly - this has been done before. It has been done, you can pick apart suggested methods and come up with excuses for why it’s impossible… But it’s so clearly not. Everything else is an engineering problem

                If you want to hear economists talk about it, Garys economics on YouTube popped into my feed a few days ago. He’s far from the only one, even Warren Buffett has gone through a plan where he says the full tax burden could be put on businesses

                And if you want to know why I don’t respect economics… It’s not because I’m not read up on it, it’s because: how can you read up on it and still think taxing the wealthy is impossible? This has been written about by economists for decades, but it doesn’t matter because there’s more convenient economic theories to push far and wide

              • Auli@lemmy.ca
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                5 months ago

                Tax companies revenue first. It would be at a lower rate then profit but also doesn’t allow them to hide the profit.