And what would happen if we did?
go lookup the tax rates in the 60s/70s. we used to
The highest bracket was taxed at 70% until Reagan’s first plan in 1981 lowered it to 50%.
It’s currently at 37% under Trump’s 2018 tax plan.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/
peaked during ww2 at 94% on high incomes (over what would be about 2.5m today). stayed at 70% or above until reagan… the entire 50s, 60s, and 70s.
And what was the capital gains tax rate at that time? Why do wealthy people get to call their income something else and get taxed less on it?
You have to go even further back, for a time when both sources of income were taxed the same
Keep in mind that’s Income Tax. Most rich people don’t actually have income, they have capital gains.
Right, that’s the real problem. We’re over hear bickering about income tax rates, while the wealthy are sitting there playing a shell game with : income? Find the income. Which cup is it under? If you tax the right one, you win a prize. Just like any shell game, the only way to win is to not play.
I like Bernie’s idea of taxing every trade on the stock market.
Why that would be huge:
It would incentize the rich to hold stocks long term, this would lead to corporations thinking more than what profits are in 3 months.
Which translates to greater stability for other investors and job security for the people who work there.
But it’s never going to happen as long as Smaug Pelosi and people like her who’s main priority is personal wealth is running the Dem party. Because we all know Republicans will never support it.
But if we don’t purge the Dem party of neo liberals, and fast, we’re all fucked. We can’t keep walking down the path of “the rich always get richer” like nothing is wrong.
Wealth is finite. And without taxes and regulations the people who already have a lot will always accumulate more faster than they can spend it.
With them hoarding all that wealth, no one else has any.
Meanwhile down on earth, you’ve just caused an entirely new class of derrivatives traded on sketchy and unregulated markets, increasing the risk of fraud to all, including small individual investors.
Wealth is finite
The size of the observable universe is ~93 billion light-years. So, you’re technically right, but…
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, but I’m not expecting you clarifying to help
Even a 1 or 2% per trade would bring massive amounts of money, not even trying to make it progressive or anything.
Years ago they tried to pass a minimum amount of time you had to hold a stock before selling…
It was a fraction of a second and neoliberals and Republicans immediately united to tell everyone how antithetical to America that was.
For some reason, that wasn’t enough to show people that both groups have the same priorities and we can’t fight an oligarchy with fucking oligarchs.
We’ll never win if only a handful of politicians are actually on our side.
But it’s almost impossible to compete against dark money in a primary, and the people running the DNC know that. So they’ll never agree to get dark money out of primaries. It’s the only reason they’re still holding back progressives.
Not even that; 0.1% per trade would bring in a huge windfall. Even something negligible like 0.01% would bring in nontrivial amounts of revenue.
The problem is that being above paying tax has become part of the identity of being rich, and the very idea of even a negligible amount of one’s wealth being taken away to be given to your inferiors is unacceptable, and the rich will defend every fluctuating cent of their wealth as a non-negotiable matter of honour, even if it means burning down the world.
Most of the rich cannot just move to a tax haven. Sure someone who inherited multi-generational wealth can hide it in the Caiman island.
But if you own a canned tomato factory, or even if you’re a business consultant, you get rich because of very local things, and can’t easily move-it away.
Has that been tried since 1790 when the french decided to behead all the rich people?
Certainly. Most of the 20th century, the top tier tax rate was set at a level that can only be described as “punitive”. It was higher than 90% to kill off the robber barons.
While I am not morally opposed to beheading rich people, we really need to go back to the tax rates we had in the 50’s. And add a securities tax, payable in shares of that security, that the IRS can liquidate slowly over time.
In my limited understanding, yes, it’s possible. But it would require significant international effort to get the super rich, the ones that can pay fabulous amounts of money to money launderers legal tax experts that know just the right loophole to ensure that mr. billionaire will pay only 500k in taxes rather than 10 million, because tax havens only exist thanks to certain countries’ very lax rules on banking.
There are already large numbers of treaties in place for countries to cooperate in tracking down tax evasion. It might not be as expensive as you think. If you think of it from a practical standpoint, we have lists of the richest people in the world. That’s an excellent starting point, isn’t it?
If some billionaire is claiming that they actually aren’t a billionaire, and that the lists are wrong, when some government is trying to tax them at an exorbitant rate, it’s likely that they will give all of their banking details to said government to prove it. Or they will hide those banking details, and they’ll be forced to pay the taxes.
