Comment by ryandrake
3 hours ago
The current system without wealth taxes already largely divorces labor from equity stake. Unless you're one of the relatively few tech or office workers who get equity compensation or have a large savings rate, you currently don't have much of a stake in any means of production.
I'm not disputing the claim that few people are able to save and invest into having a stake in the means of production.
However, if your goal is to increase stakeholdership, how would a policy that explicitly disincentivizes that behavior fix anything?
Why do I get the feeling that you would never field the structurally identical complaint against disproportionately taxing labor and consumption, even though that's a much more prominent feature of our current tax policy?
In any case, taxes do not go into a black hole, no matter how much the right likes to encourage this self-serving fiction. Taxes generally get spent down the economic ladder and move people up the economic ladder, increasing their marginal propensity to save. People must have money if you want them to save money.
Even more concretely: reversing the policies which dissolved the middle class might reasonably be expected to restore the middle class, or at least slow their demise.
How does it disincentivize "stakeholdership"? Are people expected to say, please don't make me rich, because I'd have to pay 1% of it?
Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets.
But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers, which means that there's a lot less cause for concern about those workers not owning their means of production
>Well for a start it pressurises asset holders to sell their assets.
Even assuming this is true, then what? Do you think the average joe is going to suddenly buy alphabet or meta stocks because bill ackman or ken griffin sold their shares to buy bigger yachts?