Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
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If the tax disincentivised people from buying/hoarding properties solely as receptacles to hold tax-free wealth, then it would free up housing, business space, and land.
But more directly, it would ensure that such assets are at least generating income for the treasury.
Big business taxes aren't only unrealized capital gains taxes, which is the subject we are discussing. Got any "experts in taxes" saying unrealized capital gains tax would be a good thing?
There's a few big reasons in there why it would be bad, again you selectively read for the easy ones to shit on.
Seems the fall of the coalition has been averted. Still just a matter of time really. This has not been the first time the coalition was so engaged with infighting they were on the verge of falling, and it won't be the last.
Fragile Dutch government teeters as minister resigns and Geert Wilders rages
Leaders of the Netherlands’ four governing parties are set to hold urgent talks Friday as turmoil builds in The Hague over response to football violence.www.politico.eu
It’s so SCHOOVER!
is what I’d like to say but I see this ending with a wimper. At the end of the day no one wants new elections. Least of all NSC which manoevered themselves into a position where everyone hates them. Those not aligned with the far and hard right hate them for abandoning all principles to make this coalition happen, and everyone with a stake in this coalition hates them for the vestiges of their morals requiring the other parties to compromise their far/hard right ideals to keep NSC on board.
It’s no better for Wilders. New elections give him some chances but much more risk. MAYBE they’ll get a hard right majority and Wilders becomes PM but PROBABLY they need another party and no one wants to work with him after what happened.
Or the VVD of which the leader put much of her own political reputation on making a hard right government happen. It failing so quickly and chaotically would weaken her position.
A bit of context. The strong government reaction against the Islamic community as a whole(and not just the rioters) was a strong cause for this, but not the only one. Apparently another issue that played a part for the politician to resign was that in the government itself the politician all speak in wildly racists terms against each other.
In terms of optics its not exactly a great look that the government freely vents their racism when they think that no one is looking, and that its one of the rare politicians of Moroccan descent, rather than the racists that has to go resign over it.
Your government falling again, eh? Yeah, can relate. Tho of course, we are doing our thing were it takes forever to get to the actual government part.
On to 542 baby! I want the top 3 all to ourselves.
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It's telling that every recent proposal to cut veterans' benefits has come from Republicans. It's because they love the military (since it makes them feel "tough"), but they despise the troops (because they have this nasty habit of coming home wounded and costing money, instead of conveniently dying "over there").
The biggest reason why there is a lot of countries, states and cities that are in debt is due to suburbia. All sevices like new or replacement water pipes, electricity or roads costs a lot of money and is cost effective if people live in dense areas.
Suburbia is never packed enough, and governments are unwilling to make the richer suburbianites pay more for the resources. There is a massive shortfall in tax revenue to cover this which has been covered up by releasing new land. It's a pyramid scheme with new land as the base of the pyramid paying for everyone else. This will run out, like all pyramid schemes and break a lot of cities budgets
Come on. Give them credit. Those who survive with no injury are the good strong soliders. Anyone who got injured was clearly the bad weak ones
Again, you're justifying property taxes, specifically with regards to real estate. Those are different than a wealth tax or an unrealized gains tax, they are targeted at specific forms of property to create incentive structures around owning those things, like you say. When someone says they want to tax unrealized gains, they are saying things like "this person's net worth grew from $10 million to $20 million, we should tax the difference right away", and even setting aside the real downsides of that suggestion, it's never going to create the sort of incentive structure you're describing because it's agnostic to what form that wealth takes on.
Here ya go. But we both know what's coming next, don't we? Now you'll dismiss the source altogether, because apparently we have to accept what your favoured thinktanks say and ignore the ones you don't like.
And yet you can't identify a single one you'd actually stand by.
I'm not doing your research for you. If you have a point, make it, don't just gesture vaguely at articles full of bunk and expect me to sift through the bullshit.
Yes, I'm aware. Yet property taxes are minuscule in comparison, take zero account of overall wealth, and miss out corporate shares entirely. They do not adequately fulfil the same role.
The incentive element is secondary; you're overfocusing on it. So long as some value is being extracted from the increase in wealth, the tax is doing its job, even if it stays unsold.
The treasury needs money. The ultra-wealthy, who have so much more than they need and aren't using much of it, are a worthy source. And when their wealth increases drastically by ways that require zero effort and involve no public good...? Well then that's a doubly worthy target.
Then there's the ability to substantially evade capital gains tax through the "Buy, borrow, die" technique. If there is a mechanism that essentially makes the tax ineffective, then the way that thing is taxed needs to be changed to prevent avoidance.
Whilst tax is interesting, I'm usually pretty bored with discussions on tax, because it's inevitably nothing but right-wingers telling us how no tax ever works, no tax is fair, tax will obliterate the economy and we should all let billionaires pay vastly less (proportionally) than the proles because they're just so awesome.
Rank-and-file Republicans are enthralled by the idea that the rich are just aching to create tons of great, well-paying jobs, and only that dang gub'mint is standing in their way. Upper-echelon Republicans are in love with the idea of giving all the money to the rich, so that they can dispense it to the deserving (read: upper-echelon Republicans).
If owning stocks in a company counts as "not using your wealth", then it doesn't matter who owns those stocks, there nothing you can do with them other than own them. How does one person owning those stocks count as using them less than if someone else did?
1) "If owning stocks in a company counts as not using your wealth" -- I didn't say it did mean that, necessarily; that would depend to some degree on the company.
2) "How does one person owning those stocks count less" -- It also doesn't necessarily, though the less wealth is concentrated in a small number of hands, the better for the economy as a whole, so there's a reason to transfer from the ultra rich downwards.
You're still overfocusing on the incentivisation thing. That's not the primary goal here.
I mean, personally I do think that's the more important consideration. Sure, the primary goal of taxation is to fund the government, but understanding that is easy and simple. More intricate and thus deserving vastly more care and planning is how to extract those funds in a way that incentivizes good behavior and mitigates market failures. People are going to try to minimize their tax burden in any system, so the systems are put together with the intention that good practices lead to lower tax burden, because otherwise the rich will lean more heavily into bad practices to avoid taxes. So what is the effect of taxing people on unrealized capital gains on stocks, how does one avoid that tax? The government is going to come after the ultra-rich for their stock holdings, they'll certainly have to sell off assets for cash in order to pay the tax bill, so they're going to avoid that as best they can. How does one avoid that? They could avoid ownership entirely, find a way to entrench their power and revenue streams without actually having their name down on paper as owners, which is bad as now we've distanced the people in charge from legal culpability for their actions. Or they could avoid unrealized gains by making their stocks not worth owning, by siphoning the value out of companies in an indirect way that would not benefit other stockholders. That's not great, that just prevents anyone new from gaining wealth. The potential consequences aren't great here.
As far as funding the government off of the gain in value of assets of the super rich, just actually tax capital gains like every other income. It's silly we tax the rich at reduced rates on their primary source of income while also taxing the elderly on their limited investment income at rates higher than if they got that money in any way covered by standard income taxes. Putting capital gains into the normal tax bracket rates would alleviate burdens on retired people's nest egg while vastly increasing revenue, and the only way to avoid it would be to avoid the nation's stock market entirely, which the billionaires can't do and still be billionaires, that's where the billions come from.