If you live in California and see the endless stream of TV ads against the wealth tax, reading this will make you want to murder everyone involved in those commercials.
(To be clear, I'm not advocating murdering anyone ... not even the ultra rich ... but man, their aversion to paying taxes is shameless.)
I remember doing the math when the last company I worked for was sold, and how much of a percentage of the wealth our founders received alone would be subtracted if they had made all the hundreds of us millionaires. I think the math equated to roughly 0.006% or so of their total wealth to basically instill a new millionaire class in my city which likely would have led to a little boom in spending + business creation
of the few people who did get an actual decent share and not piddly RSUs, I believe more than half stayed on in very senior roles and still do some of the best work at the company today. it's always astonishing how proportionally little of an impact wealth redistribution would have on the ultra-wealthy, and how disproportionately large of an impact that would have on the quality of life for the rest of us
A few countries, including Switzerland and Spain, have wealth taxes on a small scale. Several, most recently France, have abandoned them as unworkable.
There exists a simple self-correcting protocol for establishing the value of property: the owner declares the value, and the state reserves the right to buy at that price. Or auction it off. If the owner declines to sell that auction price becomes the new value for computing the wealth tax.
The reason they say "it's unworkable" is because the rich don't want to pay taxes.
If you live in California and see the endless stream of TV ads against the wealth tax, reading this will make you want to murder everyone involved in those commercials.
(To be clear, I'm not advocating murdering anyone ... not even the ultra rich ... but man, their aversion to paying taxes is shameless.)
you can thank Sergey 'Do No Evil' Brin for that: https://theconversation.com/why-a-vote-on-taxing-californias...
I remember doing the math when the last company I worked for was sold, and how much of a percentage of the wealth our founders received alone would be subtracted if they had made all the hundreds of us millionaires. I think the math equated to roughly 0.006% or so of their total wealth to basically instill a new millionaire class in my city which likely would have led to a little boom in spending + business creation
of the few people who did get an actual decent share and not piddly RSUs, I believe more than half stayed on in very senior roles and still do some of the best work at the company today. it's always astonishing how proportionally little of an impact wealth redistribution would have on the ultra-wealthy, and how disproportionately large of an impact that would have on the quality of life for the rest of us
There exists a simple self-correcting protocol for establishing the value of property: the owner declares the value, and the state reserves the right to buy at that price. Or auction it off. If the owner declines to sell that auction price becomes the new value for computing the wealth tax.
The reason they say "it's unworkable" is because the rich don't want to pay taxes.