Of course, they did the exact opposite with prop 13 many decades ago, creating a land owning class with disproportionately low tax rates.
In California, if you make or do something valuable, you have to pay increasing proportions of the rewards to the government. But the longer you (and your ancestors) simply own land and do nothing, the lower your tax rate.
If you hate billionaires, then stop buying any goods off Amazon or from any other billionaire owned company. My guess is your quality of life will drop precipitously.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2023/05/06/youngest-com...
Given we now have 2,500 billionaires how can they not manage to come up with new ideas that create companies any faster than that?
The reality is most billion dollar companies are made through mergers to reduce market competition not actually creating new things.
> We show that trickle-down effects do exist, but that they are quantitatively small. A one percentage point increase in the top wealth tax rate decreases aggregate employment by 0.02%, aggregate investment by 0.07%, and aggregate value-added by 0.10% in the long run. Importantly, these effects are modest despite the fact that top wealth holders—many of whom are entrepreneurs—account for a large share of economic activity in Scandinavia through the businesses they control. Our approach to estimating trickle-down effects is arguably the most innovative part of our paper. It is based on clear identification assumptions and is statistically precise.
> The modest economic effects of tax-induced migration do not necessarily imply that wealth taxation is an optimal policy. To evaluate wealth taxation, we also have to account for their effects along the intensive margin, operating through changes in savings, investments, avoidance, and evasion. Jakobsen, Jakobsen, Kleven and Zucman (2020) find sizable intensive margin effects of wealth tax reform in Denmark. Combining the migration estimates presented here with their intensive margin estimates, we show that the Scandinavian wealth taxes were below the Laffer point and that their Marginal Cost of Public Funds (MCPF) was about 4.2.54 Leaving aside equity arguments, taxing top wealth would be welfare-improving if the revenue raised is spent on projects with a Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) greater than 4.2. Comparing MVPFs across a range of policies, Hendren and Sprung-Keyser (2020) argue that programs targeted to low-income children have the highest MVPFs, often greater than 5. This suggests that funding projects for low-income children via progressive wealth taxation has the potential to increase social welfare.
Republicans scream at scientists and try to get them fired for doing climate science research, destroy funding bodies, pass legislation saying what professors can and cannot teach in class, and generally call the entire academic ecosystem a bunch of groomers. Fewer republicans choose to go to graduate school and become professors. This, somehow, means that research can never be done, justifying further destruction of academia.
I'm very sorry but I don't understand how not having a dozen race science people teaching about brain pans down the hall means my research is bunk.
Taxes on land or property are impervious to capital flight and are much more effective, but they're neutered in California.
"You can't exclude company assets over $10 million that will kill small businesses"
Or the tried and true
"If you allow this they will come after your grandmother next"
the weather is a real differentiator
The Commerce Clause covers exactly these scenarios.
lickmygiggle•10h ago
These people are stealing from you. Jail them like the thieves they are or make them pay back into the system from which they so happily benefited.
silexia•8h ago
bigyabai•7h ago
Red tape and regulation has second-order effects, many of which keep you employed. By all means, you should leave America if you have any hope for a nation that eschews regulation in it's entirety. You should stay if you want to get paid to build roads, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
silexia•3h ago
bigyabai•3h ago
SunshineTheCat•7h ago
The government on the other hand, can just tax you (often without cause or justification) and offer nothing in return for what they took by force.
Yet you'll find many people decrying billionaires as the great evil while silent on governments who are in many ways, far far worse.
saulpw•7h ago
anamax•6h ago
xhkkffbf•6h ago
Now you're right that they have more money and they can spend it. Some things like hiring a lawyer to sue someone are too expensive for an average person but accessible to billionaires. Rich people can do things with taxes loopholes that aren't practical for the average schmoe.
It is true that they often have power at their company and sometimes they use it overtly or covertly. But even this can be limited because they have to work with partners and other shareholders. The CEO of a big publicly traded company can't just break the rules because they're on a power trip.
saulpw•5h ago
Don't be obtuse. The people we're talking about don't go to the Post office, or the grocery store, and they certainly don't queue up. They don't even queue up at the airport, they have private planes, private security, private everything.
And "they only get one vote each election day". Voting is the least amount of political influence that a person can have.
xhkkffbf•3h ago
There's this mythology built around great wealth and it's largely false. They can't just snap their fingers and make things happen as if by magic. There's no special magic power that only they get. They have to pay for what they want and just like normal humans, they can only spend the money once.
saulpw•3h ago
Just like how someone who has $200k can get a mortgage to buy a house, whereas someone with only $20k cannot. That's economic power that comes from having wealth to leverage.
LunaSea•5h ago
credit_guy•3h ago
dang•1h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
p.s. The best and most HN-good part of your comment here was "I build roads".
silexia•42m ago
anamax•6h ago
Strawman.
No one is claiming "without utilizing".
However, they are part of the public that paid. Moreover, if I let you use my pen to take a note, I'm not entitled to all of the gain that you get from taking said note.
lickmygiggle•3h ago
SunshineTheCat•5h ago
I agree everyone should pay taxes, including billionaires, but this is like saying if my neighbor doesn't give me his couch, he's stealing from me. It's just logically (and morally) wrong.
Guvante•4h ago
For simplicity we only do this when a sale of an asset is made.
Claiming that adjusting this timing is theft is ridiculous, Larry Page has a debt that hasn't come due for his profits is all. Adjusting the timing on the payments of that debt isn't theft.
Per capita the rich get the best deal BTW as billionaires don't exist by a few orders of magnitude without the benefits of society. Sure they pay more taxes but they also benefit massively in comparison to most people in absolute terms of benefit.
adastra22•4h ago
Guvante•3h ago
adastra22•2h ago
Guvante•2h ago
In tax code sense I am not even sure the effects of buy, borrow, and die have even been settled.
EDIT: can't respond but "pay no taxes but at least your kids do" isn't exactly a fix
adastra22•2h ago
UncleMeat•2h ago