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Democrats 2020

Treedbear said:
Harry Bosch said:
Warren and Bernie want to dramatically increase the taxes on wealth. Bernie wants to tax wealth at 50%. I guess that means tax at 50% of it's value. Well, market value is a value at a specific time. Secondly, value does not equal cash. The only way to get cash out of stocks is to sell it. Guess what happens when Bezos sells 50% of his Amazon stock? The stock will fall like a rock. Most retirement portfolios rely on stocks. Dramatically increasing wealth taxes will wipe out many people's retirement.
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I see what you mean. The wealth tax idea was the main reason I hesitated about Warren. But that was before Bernie's heart attack, and now he's trying to outdo Warren on the wealth tax scheme. It's even a worse idea in light of that point you made. I've always said they should tax the rich more but by simply increasing the marginal tax rates. While taking away some of the reward it doesn't act as a disincentive the way a wealth tax would. Capitalism provides more than enough incentive for the super-wealthy to stay invested. All I want to do is flatten out the distribution curve on economic growth.

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Not do some kind of claw-back. As the article that chart came from said:
The idea behind a tax like this is that it would significantly reduce the accumulation of extreme wealth. For one, the tax itself would incentivize wealthy people to, well, be less wealthy in the eyes of the government. As Yglesias explained:

[T]he mere existence of the wealth tax would, on the margin, encourage wealthy individuals to dissipate their fortunes on charitable giving and lavish consumption. If you try to horde wealth the government is going to tax it, so you might as well spend it.

That is both a feature and a bug. But as some experts have pointed out, it might also encourage rich people to hide their wealth. As Saez and Zucman have written in the past, these kinds of tax proposals are “fragile.”

“They can be undermined by tax limits, base erosion, and weak enforcement,” the economists wrote in an early September 2019 paper. That’s why many countries have abandoned them. As Yglesias pointed out, of the 12 OECD-member nations that had wealth taxes in 1990, only four — France, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland — continue to implement them. But Zucman and Saez argue “that tolerating tax competition and tax evasion is a policy choice.”

Sanders does address enforcement in his plan.

He is calling for a “national wealth registry and significant additional third party reporting requirements,” as well as increasing Internal Revenue Service funding to enforce the wealth tax. The plan calls for a mandated IRS audit of 30 percent of wealth tax returns for those in the 1 percent bracket and a 100 percent audit for all the billionaires. It also establishes a 40 percent exit tax on the net value of all assets under $1 billion and 60 percent over $1 billion for anyone that wants to take their wealth to another country.
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So it seems to actually penalize any efforts by the super-successful that result in additional profits and encourages them to spend it frivolously. That's plain counter-productive. And the additional audits will increase pressure on politicians to invent ways to hide that wealth. Just keep it simple with higher marginal tax rates is what I say.
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Agreed. Or another way to say it, tax distributions or when wealth is converted to cash.
 
Treedbear said:
So it seems to actually penalize any efforts by the super-successful that result in additional profits and encourages them to spend it frivolously.
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That actually would not be a bad outcome. More spending would grow the economy and it's not like the superwealthy need all that hoarded wealth lest they be paupers in retirement.
 
Derec said:
Treedbear said:
So it seems to actually penalize any efforts by the super-successful that result in additional profits and encourages them to spend it frivolously.
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That actually would not be a bad outcome. More spending would grow the economy and it's not like the superwealthy need all that hoarded wealth lest they be paupers in retirement.
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But they'd need to spend it on things that depreciated in value. One person can only consume so much. And things like real estate and collectibles tend to increase in value.
 
https://www.economist.com/lexingtons-notebook/2010/10/14/you-cant-take-it-with-you
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If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on — and those guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most definitely do not — it was the incompatibility of democracy and inherited wealth.

With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity.
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Our Founding Fathers had a great antipathy to inherited wealth. Their observations on how this worked out in Europe demonstrated to them, that this sort of thing was not a wise idea.

I strongly suspect that if they were here today, they would not support Republican - Conservative ideas on this. Starting with estate taxes reduction. I am sure they would heartily disprove of today's present day income equality and stagnation of wages and vast accumulation of wealth of the 1%.

YMMV.
 
Treedbear said:
But they'd need to spend it on things that depreciated in value. One person can only consume so much. And things like real estate and collectibles tend to increase in value.
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Spending is different than investing. You were talking about frivolous spending, not reasonable investments. Things like luxury cars, yachts, planes. All cost a lot of money, all depreciate and most require hiring people to operate.

And I am wondering about collectibles as an investment. A lot of rich people put their money into art these days, but the art market has to be in some sort of major speculative bubble for that reason.
 
Jason Harvestdancer said:
TV and credit cards said:
While y'all argue over which codger can make it another five years, Mayor Pete is talking and people are listening.

Pete Buttigieg’s Undeniable Allure
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The problem with Buttigieg is that he doesn't make an issue of his progressive stack category. He isn't playing identity politics. That makes him almost a Republican.
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It would still be political suicide to run as the "gay candidate". People may tolerate us, but there's no affection or admiration attached to the label.
 
As younger cohorts abandon religion, they are also abandoning homophobia and the religious nonsense that feeds that. Of course it still is a big deal with right winged older Republicans who are also more religious. With 2018, we finally saw the young cohorts finally turn out at the polls in bigger numbers than the Baby Boomers and Silent Generation. Republicans will play the homophobic wedge issues at their own peril.
 
Cheerful Charlie said:
As younger cohorts abandon religion, they are also abandoning homophobia and the religious nonsense that feeds that. Of course it still is a big deal with right winged older Republicans who are also more religious.
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It is also a big deal with (mostly older) blacks, who vote strongly Democratic but tend to be socially conservative.
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As you can see, while support for gay marriage improved for all racial/ethnic categories, blacks consistently lag behind both whites and hispanics.

And black vote is essential in the Democratic primaries.
 
Politesse said:
Jason Harvestdancer said:
TV and credit cards said:
While y'all argue over which codger can make it another five years, Mayor Pete is talking and people are listening.

Pete Buttigieg’s Undeniable Allure
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The problem with Buttigieg is that he doesn't make an issue of his progressive stack category. He isn't playing identity politics. That makes him almost a Republican.
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It would still be political suicide to run as the "gay candidate". People may tolerate us, but there's no affection or admiration attached to the label.
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We're talking about the Democratic Party where black candidates run on a platform of "I am black" and female candidates run on a platform of "I am a woman". It might be suicide in the general, but not in the primary.
 
Black or female candidates, it will be less important than being xtian! No way is America ready to embrace an atheist candidate, not for a decade or two at least anyway.
 
With the impeachment inquiry... Dem primary fatigue is gently wisping away. I'm not recommending an impeachment inquiry during every primary season, but I think the lack of 24/7 concentration on it every day right now is benefiting the Dems in general.
 
angelo said:
How far do you think an impeachment inquiry will get in the senate?
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Toward what end? Conviction and removal from office is currently extremely unlikely - just slightly more possible now than it was a few weeks ago. But if that trend continues and Trump continues to publicly confess to criminal acts, it might become probable at some point in the future.
OTOH, if the idea is simply to force the Republitards in the Senate to declare their allegiance to either the US Constitution or to the orange shitgibbon, that objective can be accomplished at any time. Of course the Dems wouldn't want to force that move right now, because the attention span of the American voter barely exceeds a fifteen second commercial spot. Much better to put it off until shortly before the election...
 
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