I bet Garry Tan will find that going after him for the wealth tax won’t poll well so he will find a different angle. Thus it won’t be a debate about a wealth tax, it will just be the standard make your opponent look bad in order to unseat him.
Ok, so what is the problem here? Why can't Gary Tan engage in standard political activity like anybody else? This is his fundamental right as a citizen of a democracy.
The issue is unlimited spending. Rich people can tilt the political system to benefit themselves by their ability to spend unlimited and then push for things that enrich themselves like lower taxes that doesn’t benefit society at large.
The biggest example of this in the US is the health system that is more expensive and has worse outcomes than other countries. There is a huge and growing gap in the us between ultra wealthy and the rest of the population and it is a virtuous circle for the ultra wealthy with their ability to spend unlimited in politics.
So what? The constitution guarantees you equal rights under the law and an equal vote in each election. It does not guarantee you equal political influence. Same as you have the right to freedom of speech and of the press, but you are not guaranteed an audience.
So some people might feel slightly annoyed by this.
I don't know if you don't find this absurd, but a bunch of pedophile protecting people have shaped the actual presidency and are continuing to do so. Feeling slightly annoyed is the least offensive way I could put it
And you have every right to express that annoyance without fear of prosecution. I find the Epstein affair to be very underwhelming. Running a prostitution ring is criminal, and rich men (or poor men) fucking a 17 year old (or 18 year old) prostitute is gross, but not particularly surprising, and isn't even pedophilia. If Epstein had been in Nevada and not the US Virgin Islands and his youngest girls were a year older, it wouldn't even be illegal.
No one is stopping him, but they would be if the people in this comment section had their way. You are absolutely not required to cheer him on, and in fact you have the right to oppose him. But that isn't happening here. Nobody in these comments is exercising their first amendment rights to argue against any of his political opinions. They are using their first amendment rights to argue that the government should use its monopoly to restrict Gary Tan's right to make his argument at all.
I want to do some improvements on my house. So I take out a home equity loan. Oops! Actually since my house is worth $500K more than when I bought it, now I have to pay $100K to the government since the gain is now realized by using the asset as collateral!
You get points for effective use of rhetoric, but it's more of a solvable challenge and not a deal breaker.
The goal of a borrowing tax would be to prevent someone with a a $200 mil stock portfolio living off the "buy, borrow, die" strategy and not home equity loans on mere middle class millionaires.
Capital gains, for example, on a primary residence already have an exclusion of a certain amount. There's no reason a borrowing tax can't kick in only after one has let's say 10mil in assets or securities.
Heck, you could even exempt primary residences regardless of value, so you should be fine
I mean most taxes like this have an 'above X amount' clause. Such as the gains you get taxed on when selling your home. California it's $500K in gains if you are married so extrapolating that your scenario would be covered.
The only reasonable argument I can think of is that the fantastic wealth accumulated at the top was substantially driven by the $37 trillion of debt the USA finds itself in. And it needs to be clawed back somehow.
It's actually much simpler than that. We need to pay down the debt, and because the rich have most of the money they are going to need to do most of the paying down whether or not they directly are responsible for it or benefited from it. It's simple math. But what does this have to do with a wealth tax? The entire concept is stupid. Income an capital gains rates can be increased.
> I don't really see any other solution, can you explain it?
One reason a wealth tax is controversial and less precedented is that it taxes unrealized gains.
Another alternative would be to raise taxes on high income rather than wealth. In the 1950s people were taxed at something like 90% for every dollar over $400,000. We could go back to something like that but adjust that $400,000 to something like a couple of million, to match inflation.
This essentially puts a cap on wages. The money you make below the cap would be taxed at the same rates we pay today. Once you get above that amount, you keep most of what falls below, but the government would take almost all of what's above the cap.
I think if you do it that way you would also have to tax interest and capital gains similarly to wages. That's another loophole that's very commonly exploited in the last few decades, investment income gets taxed lower.
- government lobbying for tax codes and loopholes, made specifically to benefit them
- abuse of various systems like H1B's and even SNAP (e.g. Wal-Mart) to subsidize their lack of payment to american taxpayers
- extracting value from public research (funded by taxpayers) and creating private products for sale. Sometimes they may even try to patent such breakthroughs for themelves despite public invention
- engaging in dark patterns and anti-competitive, anti-union behavior to extract wealth in ways that would potentially be proven illegal... had they not paid off the judges
- Performing untold of, actually illegal grifts (cases like SBF are only the tip of the iceberg)
And at this rate we may have to throw in "abusing funds to protect against the most heinous criminals imaginable".
Need I go on? There's pratically no such thing as a billionaire who earned their net worth.
