NYC has a "right to housing" law that requires the government to provide a roof for anyone who needs it, including migrants. With the recent influx of migrants this is causing unforeseen spending that will total $5bn in 2023.
For a guy who's always railing about the value of honest, rational discourse, he's unbelievably misleading and political in this post. He ignores asset growth and the fact that all the wealth tax proposals have a very high floor for the tax.
Saying the government will take 45% of your wealth above $100M is very different than saying the government will take 45% of your wealth.
The time-value of money is basic. 1% wealth tax, 3% inflation and 5% annual growth leads to more money in the future, not less. (Those percents are conservative.) Is it possible that PG doesn't understand this? Or is it shallow politics; lying and using his platform spread FUD. For shame.
So 1% wealth tax is equivalent to 50% tax on the return of the asset, every year.
Say what you want, but this makes holding the asset or investing a lot less attractive. It will affect people's decisions and willingness to invest. Maybe we're OK with less investment but we shouldn't assume there is no impact.
In addition what if this is a volatile asset (read: startup) whose value goes up and down? Will the gov't give you a refund if it loses 20% of its value 10 years in?
What if the asset is illiquid (again:startup)? Who will lend to an otherwise not-wealthy startup founder 1% of their company's paper value every year to pay the tax? Because if the startup fails most founders will have to declare bankruptcy (having paid years of paper wealth taxes with no positive outcome in the end).
> Say what you want, but this makes holding the asset or investing a lot less attractive.
Not really. Where else is that money going to go? It's not enough to just say there is a disincentive, you have to show that the disincentive is so great that it makes other opportunities more attractive. But those other opportunities don't exist, because it is a wealth tax, it doesn't matter what instrument you use, the tax will still hit you.
Also, those numbers are pretty much non-sense in today's economy, with inflation consistently below 2% and nominal capital asset growth being closer to 10%, a 1% wealth tax represents a tax rate of ~12.5%.
I'm not losing sleep over a startup founder who owns so much of a company to be worth over $100MM on paper or otherwise. Startup founders have the ability to sell a part of their shares in liquidity events. If they choose to hold onto their shares above all else, it's on them to figure out how to pay the tax. It might even create a whole new financial instrument or class of investments.
> It might even create a whole new financial instrument or class of investments.
Absolutely. There will be a layer of, essentially, financial parasites taking value away from value creators to make this 'work'. Not sure what's great about that.
Capital can move globally, but if you remain a citizen, you still owe on the wealth tax, because again, no instrument is restricted. If you want to renounce your citizenship to the US and pay the exit tax instead, be my guest, I'm sure we could tighten up any loopholes and remove access to American capital markets for those that want to flee.
I also love how creating liquidity is now considered being a financial parasite. The US is nothing without the financial innovations that we have developed and embraced over the last 150 years.
Think about it, it will be cheaper/better for $1M of US capital to be invested in UK vs the US.
In the US both you and the founder/management team/other investors all pay tax if company is successful; in UK, only you (as US citizen) pay tax. You and the founders/management can split the difference and will be better off.
These things may sound small but play out significantly at scale (like interest rates etc)
> Think about it, it will be cheaper/better for $1M of US capital to be invested in UK vs the US.
That is a vast oversimplification of the problem that ignores all of the reasons to start and do business and business operations in the US, because there are already tons of places that you could start your company at that would result in lower taxes, yet very few if any choose to do so. You are making a huge logical leap that businesses will be as successful running out of the UK with its laws, regulations, and taxes as the US.
The world is not as simple and clean as whatever economic model you can cook up in your head. If it was, companies wouldn't pay developers in the US $300k/yr.
I agree, but you can make the same argument about people borrowing less if the fed increases interest rates by 0.1%. There are a ton of factors that go into someone getting financing and moving interest rate by 0.1% should be a non-issue. But on average these things do change people's behavior.
My principle is we should remove all obstacles for starting/running/investing in companies, which are the engine of the economy and create both wealth and jobs, and we should tax outcomes and consumption. Also, we should keep things simple to avoid both overhead and tax avoidance that comes with complexity.
He also seems to be assuming that business owners earn 100% of their wealth at the beginning of their careers and that the government will be chiseling away at their lump sum earnings for their entire working life...
Why does asset growth matter if you're taking n% no matter what?
Edit: After reading the responses, I think people are confusing themselves with dollar amounts. If I have 100 units of X. The government takes 1 unit in the first year, 0.99 units the next, and so on. Over time my total number of units decreases. The notional value of those units can fluctuate but the absolute number of units owed to the government remains the same.
My original question, which I suppose has been answered, centered on this concept that the notional value claimed by the government is the only thing of value being lost. A unit of wealth is lost and wealth compounds over time.
Disclaimer, I'm not advocating for or against a wealth tax. Just trying to understand an argument and now apparently teaching it.
Without asset growth, after 1 year you have $990.
If you include let's say 5% asset growth, after 1 year you have $1,000 * 1.05 * 0.99 = $1,039.
Then after another year, without growth you have $980.1
With %5 growth you have $1,040 * 1.05 * 0.99 = $1,080.
So the article claims that with 1% wealth tax you'll lose 45% of your assets over time. With any growth above 1% every year, you will actually at least break even.
That's one way to look at it. Another way is to say that if wealth tax offsets growth exactly, then the government has taken the difference of what your wealth would have been after 60 years. For example,
1 - 1000*(1-.01+.01)^60 / [1000*(1+.01)^60] ~= 45% taken from the government
Which is the same as the author of the article found.
Except the article implies that you might be nearly destitute. The article seems to imply that you'd have very little wealth left, even though that's not the case.
I just read the article again, and I don't see any language in it to support the idea that it's implying you'd have any less wealth than it calculates that you would.
I'm not saying his math is not correct, I'm saying it is misleading that he does not even mention growth at all. He presents carefully selected numbers, ignores tons of stuff around (growth, but also the fact that wealth would be marginal tax) and then makes a bold claim that people will believe in.
except the wealth tax is not at anything other that the most ridiculously wealthy people in society. the wealth tax is proposed for precisely the reason that it slows down the growth of the ultra elite ruling class type society in favor of a more equitable one that is, you know, a society. bezoar shouldn’t have billions of dollars and influence society like he does... it’s obscene.
You don't think billionaires have political power? What about the tax breaks states use to entice Amazon to build a new HQ? What about Elon Musk trying to shape public opinion against rail transit?
The US literally just elected a billionaire with no prior political experience to the Presidency four years ago!
>bezoar shouldn’t have billions of dollars and influence society like he does... it’s obscene.
Why not? People voluntarily gave him and his company this money, voluntarily invested in Amazon. What gives you the right to try and take it from him? "Envy makes right" is not the basis for a very good moral system.
What gives society the right to have a progressive tax system that expects those with more to contribute more to the common good? Because there is a general belief that everyone is dependent on the community in which they live and should contribute to it.
Currently, extremely wealthy people get tax breaks for contributing to "charity". The majority do so by creating a Foundation of their own to invest in the charitable causes that they prefer.
However, taxation goes to where the community has decided is needed, hopefully through a form of representative government.
We should not have to rely on Bill Gates deciding to invest in vaccine research to ensure that it occurs. Some of his wealth, now accumulated, should be returning to the common-wealth via taxation.
This ensures that wealth does not accumulate within very small groups of people to the extent that the rest of society does not also share that wealth.
A). The parent doesn't claim morality as the foundation.
B). Thriving in a capitalist system is also not a foundation for morality.
C). There are no underlying structures that dictate/require the sum total of individual actions have to correspond to societal good (not that i'm aware of). This would be akin to claiming that drug dealers have moral superiority.
What we have here is a version of the tragedy of the commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#:~:text...). Something that benefits the individual on the short term while negatively impacting large swaths of connected infrastructure. In a society where money == votes I can't seen how that's a valid and functioning path forward.
The word "obscene" used that comment literally means "offensive to the prevailing standards of morality", so I think you'll find it does claim morality as its basis.
But asset isn't guaranteed to grow at 5%, it only grows that much on average.
What you say makes sense if the wealth tax is applied on ETF/index fund holdings, but for most founders, the wealth is concentrated in holdings in their own company. On average, across all founders, the asset growth might be 5%, but for each individual there is significant variance. For nearly half of founders, wealth tax would take 1% on either a flat or a depreciating asset..
If your company, or your ownership value in said company, is valued at over the wealth tax floor ($50M?), and is "flat or depreciating" every year over the (according to PG) 60 years you control the asset, then you have much bigger worries than a 0.5% wealth tax.
Yes, you do. So why add yet another worry (a 0.5% wealth tax).
Keep in mind that "flat or depreciating" companies are way more common than you think. Not every company enjoys the annualized returns of the S&P500. Almost any non-tech or non-tech-adjacent company has remained either flat or depreciated, in the last 10 years.
That's the entire reason why lay people invest in the index, because it's relatively safe from depreciation. Most of the super-wealthy don't achieve that wealth on the back of the S&P500, they achieve that on the back of owning a single zero-to-one stock. It's one thing for the company to grow from 0 to {insert equilibrium valuation}, and another thing entirely for the company to continue to grow at a rate that outpaces inflation.
The argument you'll get back though is that that 0.5% wealth tax will no longer impact you _at all_ if your asset value drops below $50M.
A 0.5% wealth tax is not going to make you poor. It could, _at absolute worst_, make you worth "only $50M". If you still manage to go from $50M -> $20M, a wealth tax had absolutely nothing to do with that.
As well, although it's not explicitly mentioned, I would expect any floor-value (such as $50M) to be set to keep pace with inflation.
Okay, $50M was just the number for the sake of the argument, but the core argument still applies for those individuals worth $100M in the same circumstance, or $500M, etc etc etc.
Your argument doesn't refute my central argument, it refutes an unimportant implementation detail.
> Most of the super-wealthy don't achieve that wealth on the back of the S&P500
Are you saying that most of the super-wealthy do not (at least to a certain point) diversify their investements? Or is your point that most super-wealthy individuals acquired their wealth themselves by investing (or founding) a single corporation themselves?
Most of the super-wealthy derive their wealth from owning significant ownership in extremely valuable corporations. Outside of hedge fund managers and Warren Buffett, most of the super-wealthy do not have sufficiently diverse investments whose annualized returns may cover the annual wealth tax bill.
I agree there will be huge variance. I'm only suggesting that if you model growth of assets as well as a wealth tax then your numbers will look different.
Most assets do not 'grow in value'. Take a building any building. Sell it today. Sit on the cash for 50 years. How much building can you buy in 50 years? Not nearly as much.
The only reason we are even talking about wealth tax is because of the crazy unable to be funded programs some people are proposing. These programs sound nice on paper until you do the math on them. Then they realize they can not pay for it at all.
I would posit that most assets are in relation to other real assets worth about the same. If I sell that building and buy the one that is say about the same right next to it am I going to 'pay more'? Cash wise most certainly. Utility wise not so much. Do not confuse cash with value. It is easy to get them mixed up.
> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States
No, the federal government does not have that power; Art. I, Sec. 2, Cl. 3: “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers”. A wealth tax (or other real or personal property tax) is a direct taxes not apportioned as Constitutionally required.
State governments may or may not have that power, according to their own Constitutions (most, I would imagine, do.)
Cash, specifically, doesn’t grow in value — but most ultra-millionaires aren’t sitting on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in cash. If you’d held onto the building for 50 years, it’d probably be a very different story.
My parents have owned their home for about 50 years now. If they sold it today and turned around and bought another house they pretty much could get about the same sized house. The about 20k they paid for it 50 years ago in some places would not even get you a down payment.
Wealth is not the same as cash value. It is easy to miss the distinction. We may be agreeing? We also already have a 'wealth tax' on many items already. We call it property tax.
Yeah but if your wealth has compounded 400% over 40 years, and they took 40% compounded, then that paints a different picture. He’s playing games around the idea that 100% is the cap because that’s how most people would think about money.
My guess is that you're the one misunderstanding the math here.
At a 1% wealth tax, you will end up being 45% less wealthy in 40 years than you would be without the wealth tax.
There is a 100% cap on what the government can take from you. And, with a 1% wealth tax, they are taking 45% of it (spread over 40 years).
Put another way, the 1% wealth tax is similar to a 45% capital gains tax (where the cap is also 100%). Capital gains is just more front-loaded (paid upon liquidation) whereas wealth tax is paid over time.
And every dollar that I pay in income taxes makes me less wealthy in 40 years since I am at the point that every marginal dollar I make is invested. We all need to pay taxes and need to do so in proportion with our ability to do so, whether that is income, sales, property, excise, import, impact, sin, payroll, wealth, estate, or otherwise. We are running $1,000,000,000,000+ deficits every year in this country because people think they are taxed too much despite having the lowest tax rates in modern history, what utter hogwash.
I’m not misunderstanding anything, but that’s a cool way to blaze into a convo lol. Most/borderline all of these plans kick in above income thresholds, ie you dip down below 50M and you’re not paying the tax. So that’s one way you’re not getting 45%. The other way is that asset growth will play a huge role in how this tax effects you. The only way to get the 45% number is to say your assets didnt grow in 60 years, which is not realistic. In fact if your assets are growing even around average rates over 60 years you could pay in huge excess of the original principal, while also making a killing.
> The only way to get the 45% number is to say your assets didnt grow in 60 years, which is not realistic.
This is the misunderstanding I'm pointing out. You will end up being 45% less wealthy regardless of whether your assets grow or not. If your assets grow YoY, you will still end up being 45% less wealthy bc your YoY gains are also taxed by the 1% wealth tax.
I get it (and don’t know why i went down this road on a whim). My (original) point was that at something like 8% avg return you’re up 5900% over 60 years instead of being 10900% up.
Only if your wealth is so far above say $50m that a few tens of millions is completely inconsequential. If it's closer to $50m, then it will be a whole lot less than 45% and possibly nothing.
45% of wealth OVER 50 million. How do you not see the difference? The idea is that you wont discourage anyone from doing anything because they're already a multi millionaire. Who is going to be bitter about being a multi millionaire?
Eh? Pg’s twitter account is one of the most interesting. I follow over a thousand, and pg is hardly a blip when it comes to pontification. (That word is surprisingly hard to spell out.)
You're focused on the trees, not the forest. The prior commenter is right: Unless you are very poor (and get Medicaid) or old (and get Medicare), most Americans receive no government assistance for healthcare.
The average value I glean from an average article is less than if I had stared at a wall instead. I'll gladly pay a modest sum for a consistently high quality long form news service. However, everyone I've found is asking hundreds- thousands/yr which is neither modest nor affordable for most people, myself included.
NYT, wapo, BBC, fox, CNN, etc all push out tonnes of clickbait garbage every day. If that's not making them enough money then maybe they should get back to investigative journalism. I want long, painstakingly neutral, well researched, and cited articles on topics that concern me. E.g. healthcare, economics, politics. I find more value from the participants in discussion boards I frequent than just about every article I read. Sure, there's a few that provide more value than the participants like the work out of the ICIJ, but they don't hide their work behind paywalls, have ads, or run clickbait, and yet somehow they remain solvent... Hmm...
Do you think the 1,600 journalists at The New York Times, many of whom work in difficult environments (including the White House, lol), should work for free? Quite the Scrooge move.
Calling someone a scrooge or cheap for finding a hole in a technical limitation device that is sloppy in its implementation as it is click-bait in it's dark patterns of pretending the page is an open page/free page so it can compete in the search engines but in reality it presents a paid-gate that only appears after leading content is very unhackernews like.
NYT one of the largest most profitable companies pretends to show you an article baits you and demands money and you are a scrooge for not paying? In that context they are the rich entity and should give the content away (the way Scrooge should have). No where in the story does it mention Tiny Tim finding coal in Scroogle's garbage and someone stopping him and calling him cheap for not paying full price because Scrooge employes so many people.
> it is click-bait in it's dark patterns of pretending the page is an open page/free page so it can compete in the search engines but in reality it presents a paid-gate that only appears after leading content
This is the most important point here. If your content is not actually public, you really shouldn't get the benefits of search engine exposure, HN exposure, or even the distribution from sharing what appears to be a URL to a hypertext document.
Whenever I see a New York Times link somewhere, I just move on now since I know I can't read it. I'm not going to pay a subscription for every web site I might want to read an article on. Their business model is not my concern; if they want my business they'll have to try something else.
Seconded. There's something very tasteless about a bunch of very well paid tech employees who'll readily decry adtech, tracking and data brokerage (despite many of them working on it themselves), who'll proclaim "there has to be another way!", who'll also lambast modern journalism for "falling quality", circumventing content subscriptions and depriving publishers of revenue simply because of a built-up sense of entitlement to everything being free.
If the content is worth reading, i.e. it's from a publisher you believe to be of sufficient quality to try and find methods to work around their subscriptions, then it's worth paying for.
Reading many opinion pieces from NYT, I wouldn't cry if the vast majority of those journalists became unemployed. It's outrage journalism and thus not worthy of my time or attention.
NYT does do good journalism, but, even for a company with their credentials and resources, its share seems to be ever dwindling as time goes on.
I feel like, if PewDiePie can make 1 Million a month in youtube ad-revenue and 8 million total. A Newssite like NYT ought to be able to support their staff, thanks to a global reach and 240Million views per month.
NYT should adopt the business model of a youtube edgelord and then pay its journalists submarket wages does not sound like a very realistic approach to running a solvent news organization.
I don't think they should work for free. I'm not under the impression that they do work for free, or that blocking ads or paywalls will cause them to work for free.
I don't subscribe to the idea that you can steal something which is non-rivalrous and non-excludable.
To steal is "to take illegally, or without the owner's permission, something owned by someone else" - can't really take the bits from NYT - after someone reads their article without paying them NYT has no less bits than they had before.
Do you assume all HN users would reach the paywalls' read-limits through organic everyday use?
I felt forced to disable cookies and javascript on the following sites just after exclusively clicking on links submitted to HN: NYT, Medium, Washington Post, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and Harvard Business Review.
I'd prefer if submitters choose more user-respecting sources, but until then I refuse to feel guilty over stopping these intrusive sites and their dark patterns.
Do you think that if the New York Times sends you a copy of their article, you're obligated to pay for it, even if you didn't agree to pay for it?
I'm happy to pay for content. I donate $10/mo to both Mother Jones and ProPublica. That's more for each than the cost of a New York Times subscription. Neither of these has a paywall. I'd prefer that they didn't have popovers either, but that's about as good as I can expect in the modern anti-privacy, anti-attention culture of the internet. I just don't feel obligated to pay for content that is sent to me without me ever agreeing to pay for it.
I also think search engines shouldn't index paywalled content, and that newsfeeds like HN or Reddit shouldn't allow links to paywalled content, and I consistently downvote paywalled content.
EDIT: I'm also going to start requesting that people not link to paywalled content when I see it, I think.
Sidebar: working for and writing at tbe NYT - or any "news" publisher - doesn't make you a journalist. Journalist is a process and a result. We're too quick to use the word journalist. The low bar should not be so normalized.
It's not just amount of snow but terrain. A fair bit of snow on a flat surface might be fine, but even a little bit on a slope can quickly become problematic if you don't have 4x4.
I wonder how this sounds to people who live in, say, Switzerland, where it is very mountainous, snows frequently, and literally nobody drives a truck, and even the cars are not AWD.
I mean, I _know_ how it sounds because I am one of those people. But I wonder how Americans think this sounds.
European countries are much more compact, which makes public transportation much easier to justify. By contrast, the US is extremely spread out and public transportation yields much less ROI even in many urban areas.
Vehicle ownership in the US is practically a requirement because you have to drive to get anywhere. Therefor, having a versitile vehicle like a truck is more apealing.
Trucks also tend to be more durable than cars so they're more common in the used market, especially in the midwest.
...but for many, a truck is just an aesthetic/lifestyle symbol. The "country" lifestyle is generally associated with independence and work ethic - traits which are highly valued in the US. Trucks are a classic symbol of that lifestyle. That's why country songs stereotypically mention trucks.
The OP wasn't arguing for public transport, so I don't get where your comments on that came from from. I totally get what you mean about "symbols" though.
> Trucks also tend to be more durable than cars
Surely the engine, drivetrain, clutch etc are the same parts you'd find in cars? Curious about what you mean here?
I drive a normal FWD car during winter weather almost nobody will go out in. I drove it cross-country through the worst snowstorm the midwest experienced in the last 10 years where I couldn't see more than 10ft in front of me.
All that said, I would have been much safer in a truck.
Alabama is the size of England. Using individual US states as points of reference for entire European countries is one form of the incomensorability. Columbus, Ohio is as far from San Diego, California as Barcelona is from Moscow. Except there's pretty much nothing but empty plain, mountains, and desert in between. Ohio has 10,000 km^2 of fresh water...about a quarter of Switizerland.
Recognizing the difference of scale is not a claim to exceptionalism. The US's scale makes it more like Russia than any western European country.
Inyo County, California is 1/3 the area of Switzerland. At population 18,000, it has fewer people than any Canton save Appenzell Interhoden (~16,000). Inyo County is surrounded by more Mojave. The Mojave Desert is the size of Portugal...nearly thrice that of Switzerland.
>> Took me an hour-plus to download the timelapse app.
Oh wow. I had the same experience. In my case I just wanted to update the existing apps I had installed. Apparently you need a Sony entertainment account to install apps (it must be a new requirement as I never had one when I installed the apps in the first place).
I tried for 15 minutes to create an account using the camera.
* My A6000 doesn't have a touch screen so I had to use the camera's wheels to operate the on-screen keyboard
* The account creation page is non-responsive.
You would think Sony Entertainment Network's account login/creation webpage would be responsive so it would be usable within the camera OR there would be a completely different page. NO, it is the same desktop, non-responsive page including Google's painful anti-bot script which requires me to select 10 images that represent street signs using the camera wheel.
Amazingly, I could actually use the A6000 to create an account, but it kept erroring out when submitting. Finally, I realized it would be easier to just use my laptop and to my surprise it still failed because their account creation was down. About 10 attempts later it still failed with a slightly different error, but I still received the account creation success email (?) and was able to login fine after that.
I am also a Sony Alpha user and the interface seems anti-designed. Like, willfully obtuse and user-hostile. I know UI is not easy, but relative to the scope/scale of Sony, how hard would it really be for them to cop even a few best practices in software design?
Agreed. The Alpha software reeks of "design by committee" for the entire mass of camera users to allow anything to be controlled with equal weight. It's a major problem.
But I disagree with this and the article; SLRs is based on historic professional use of manual cameras; to which, much of the manual design is useful for.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/nyregion/adams-nyc-migran...