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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Meanwhile, Warren is rolling with the audience
and getting “come on” and “mmhmm” yelled at her and she’s totally vibing with that energy.
Like to see her plan for resolving the potential unconstitutional nature of her tax plan, the lynch-pin upon which the rest of her proposals relies on.
Personally I think it'd be a bad idea to risk making this a matter for the Supreme Court to decide. Particularly with a lineup like the one we've got.
Edited by M84 on Apr 25th 2019 at 1:41:28 AM
Disgusted, but not surprisedTo be honest very few people with wealth over 50 million will have their real resource consumption noticeably decreased by taking 2% off it per year, at that level the marginal utility of normal human amounts of money becomes *shrug*. That means it doesn't actually offset much spending in terms of resource consumption and inflation and basically only exists to make the arbitrary predicted budget balance sufficiently virtuous-looking because aaah deficits will kill us all.
This is why I really really really don't like about Pay Go or any other kind of artificial budget constraint like a German-style Schuldenbremse. It means that passing all the actually helpful stuff in your manifesto is predicated on extracting enough dollars from exactly the people who are most opposed to your project and have their property most protected by national and international constitutions rather than securing the actual real resources like labour and raw materials from the private sector.
I'm entirely in favour of mass expropriation of wealth from millionaires, but don't link it to anything as pointless as a "balanced budget" because then they can blackmail you with capital strikes to stop the other half of your project while hiding behind the Constitutional/Supreme Court protections on private property rights and such. Thank whatever god(s) you prefer for the unwritten UK constitution, or we'd be in the same bind.
Edited by DeathorCake on Apr 25th 2019 at 10:32:12 AM
Another issue is that "net worth" means a helluva lot more than just money. It's everything.
Trying to actually put this into practice would be like the clusterfuck that is the estate tax in the USA. Except it'd be every year as opposed to once in a lifetime.
One of the main obstacles besides the potential unconstitutionality is that the super rich often have hard-to-value assets. Like, say part of your net worth is an art collection. Depending on how much it's valued, that art collection could be the difference between you paying this tax and you not paying this tax. And if you know anything about the art scene, the value of artwork is quite nebulous.
Every year, people would have to have everything they own valued to see how much they have to pay for the wealth tax. Or even if they have to pay it at all, depending on how close they are to $50 million in net worth. Every piece of artwork, every piece of jewelry, every private business...this would take weeks or months for these people.
Anyone here have any experience with filing an Estate Tax Return? Well, imagine having to do that every year.
Edited by M84 on Apr 25th 2019 at 6:45:04 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Measuring all that stuff is not an impossible task, nowhere near the scale of the problem early states had with rendering their territories legible to lawmaking and taxation in the first place. Problem is that the wealth that's fairly easy to tally up and tax is also the stuff with the least actual use, since most financial assets are basically promises of dollars and you don't need those if you're the US government. Not sure how the US tax regime on housing and the financialisation thereof works, probably some scope for good things there.
Not particularly worried about giving multi-millionaires more paperwork to do, problem is enforcing it hard enough to stop basically everyone dodging the tax.
Wealth taxes are very much a blunt and imprecise instrument for taking swings at the ruling class, which is fine if you're insulated from capital flight, don't need their cooperation and have other tools for other problems, but "an excuse for spending money" is IMO not the best reasoning for one.
If you have $50 million-plus in personal wealth I'm not going to cry too much over you having to hire some more accountants to be honest, but it does seem like a rather pointless extra demand to place on a badly underfunded IRS for what's basically political covering fire.
Edited by DeathorCake on Apr 25th 2019 at 10:57:10 AM
Not an impossible task, but an extremely complicated and time-consuming one. It's hard enough just doing that for the estate tax, which is a one-time thing. And Warren's plan expects people to do that every year. You'd need to get started valuing your assets for the next year right after filing the taxes for the current year!
And there are apparently no exempt assets either. Meaning someone whose net worth is almost entirely tied into their business would be fucked.
Edited by M84 on Apr 25th 2019 at 6:54:00 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Which I suppose is good news for one of my in-laws, given that she's an accountant.
And again, it's not just liquid assets. Net worth means everything they have and own. Money, businesses, real estate, stocks...everything.
And yes, the IRS is in no way prepared to handle something like this. Yes, Warren plans to overhaul the IRS to prepare it for this...but it would require a serious overhaul.
Edited by M84 on Apr 25th 2019 at 6:59:54 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Again, for a good chunk of these people, it is not all actually money. Heck, for a good chunk of these people, most of their net worth may not actually be money or even easily valued assets.
Not all of these people are trust fund babies who can simply sell off some of the stocks in their portfolio to pay this tax.
Edited by M84 on Apr 25th 2019 at 7:03:26 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Pretty much all large companies work a bit or a lot like banks in these financialised times, they'll have financial assets and investment funds they can liquidate. Still, don't care if someone with 50 million has to sell a couple of houses to pay taxes, they still have far too much control over the resources available to humankind after going down to $49m and/or being short rental property #35.
Edited by DeathorCake on Apr 25th 2019 at 11:12:15 AM
The point is, it's a lot more complicated than simply taking two cents from every dollar, as Warren worded it.
It's more like going over everything you own, trying to calculate how much it's actually worth, then figuring out how to pay 2% or 3% of that worth in money even if you don't actually have that much liquid cash.
Edited by M84 on Apr 25th 2019 at 7:18:11 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedDemocrats Think Biden Is Electable, But He’s Not Everyone’s First Choice
. Note that despite the title, it also has some - sobering - discussion about who is perceived as "electable" and why.
And now it's official: Biden is now running.
All I can say was I was wrong that he wasn't going to run. I really wish he wasn't.
x2 To be fair, I will vote for him if he is the Democratic Candidate, because he's better then Trump, that's for sure.
Yeah, the whole situation around her Native American Ancestry probably hurt her more then it helped her, especially after that one Native American group (who I can't remember) condemned her for even trying to prove it.
It's probably not just the Native American controversy, IMO her problem is that she's perceived as too similar to Hillary (who lost against Trump - pretty weighty "electability" argument right there) and most voters don't care about the fine points of policy.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanHer proposals seem to poll well — people seem to love the wealth tax thing — but the actual candidate? They're not so confident in her for some reason.
Looking at some polls in Massachusetts, she apparently polls worse than Sanders. That's in her own home state. Probably not an encouraging sign.
Part of that I suppose stems from some of the stuff she's done that resulted in her underperforming in Mass., as you mentioned way back.
Edited by M84 on Apr 25th 2019 at 7:46:50 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedCan someone give me an update on the Native American controversy? 'Cause from what I remember from when that was news Warren had merely said her mother told stories of how she had some Native American ancestry, the right-wing media twisted that into Warren saying she was Native America, and some Native organization jumped the gun to chastise her without fact-checking first. Did anything else happened in the meantime?

Sanders meanwhile always acts as if the whole concept of systemic racism and sexism is utterly alien to him.
Disgusted, but not surprised