I have an idea. I hope you read this and take the time to set me straight, because this sure makes sense to.me and my addled old brain.
What if we dropped income taxes altogether (well, sort of; more on that later)? What if, instead, we tax assets. I looked at some government web site that gave a figure of about $750 trillion in privately held assets. If that was taxed at .5%, it would exceed our current tax revenue. On top of that, we would tax income at 1%. All the games wealthy and corporations play to shelter themselves from income taxes would disappear. Capital gains versus earner income would be moot. ALL non-goverment held assets would be taxed. The biggest warp in our current gilded age isn't income - though that's bad enough, it's wealth. We have hyper billionaires like Musk and Bezos who make "earn" 10 times what people in the top 1% earn, but who are worth 1,000 times as much, or more. For a typical family, taxes would go down, in some cases quite a lot (people who rent rather than own). The ones who would be hurt by this - primarily retired homeowners and farmers - could defer taxes until their property is sold (at which point all back taxes are collected.
The point is twofold: to make the tax burden more fairly distributed; and to discourage hording wealth and instead put that wealth into wages, toward a more equitable distribution of wealth.
This is obviously a very incompletely fleshed out (or, frankly, thought out) proposal.
Please set me straight.
By the way, thank you so much for what you do to enlighten us all.
I have an idea. I hope you read this and take the time to set me straight, because this sure makes sense to.me and my addled old brain.
What if we dropped income taxes altogether (well, sort of; more on that later)? What if, instead, we tax assets. I looked at some government web site that gave a figure of about $750 trillion in privately held assets. If that was taxed at .5%, it would exceed our current tax revenue. On top of that, we would tax income at 1%. All the games wealthy and corporations play to shelter themselves from income taxes would disappear. Capital gains versus earner income would be moot. ALL non-goverment held assets would be taxed. The biggest warp in our current gilded age isn't income - though that's bad enough, it's wealth. We have hyper billionaires like Musk and Bezos who make "earn" 10 times what people in the top 1% earn, but who are worth 1,000 times as much, or more. For a typical family, taxes would go down, in some cases quite a lot (people who rent rather than own). The ones who would be hurt by this - primarily retired homeowners and farmers - could defer taxes until their property is sold (at which point all back taxes are collected.
The point is twofold: to make the tax burden more fairly distributed; and to discourage hording wealth and instead put that wealth into wages, toward a more equitable distribution of wealth.
This is obviously a very incompletely fleshed out (or, frankly, thought out) proposal.
Please set me straight.
By the way, thank you so much for what you do to enlighten us all.