News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Liquidity issues.
For example, loads of elderly people in California own homes that have very low property taxes which were assessed decades ago. If their property values were re-assessed today they wouldn’t be able to afford the property tax and would have to sell their home and move (possibly flee the state).
Now that’s not the situation these billionaires are in. They aren’t tied up in a single house they’d have to sell. Their issue is that they’d have to sell a lot of stocks to pay a wealth tax, an event that could trigger a huge market drop in the price of those stocks.
You can be extremely asset-rich while being relatively cash-poor. I say relatively because these billionaires likely have millions in cash sitting around but that might not be enough to afford tens of millions in taxes every year (which must be paid in cash, not stocks).
I'm one of those people who's a bit asset-rich while not at all cash-rich. I'm not whining to anyone about it, that's the way I arranged things, and there were benefits to it as well as risks. I saw the tradeoffs and made my choices. I can always sell one of the properties if I need to, or take a bit more of a mortgage on it (my overall debt/equity is about 18%, so mortgaging is easy). But people with more are more able to pay, regardless of their asset-allocation choices. The whole "granny starving in a $3M house" story is a malicious crock of shit that only a fool would fall for.
And same with those billionaires. In fact, their asset allocation challenges don't mean a fucking thing to me. They're filthy rich due to a broken, crooked system. In a sane, healthy society there wouldn't be billionaires at all. So a correction is needed. They can take a haircut or they can face a much more extreme reckoning in the future. Up to them. And if they want to up sticks and move to Dallas, that's their choice too. They can go be parasites on a less aware host.
I’m not whining on their behalf, I’m warning that this approach to taxation will not hit the intended target. Billionaires whose assets are mostly concentrated in stocks have no reason to make California their primary residence. They can live anywhere in the world and if forced to they will do so.
If you want an effective tax on tech billionaires you should find a way to tax an asset they can’t move: intellectual property. That’s where all tech billionaires ultimately derive their wealth. I personally am against IP altogether, but I’ll take an IP tax as a consolation prize.
It goes without saying that land value tax is another tax on assets that can’t be moved. I also want to see LVT tried.
Billionaires can already live anywhere and they continue to live in their chosen country. They continue to live where they live because they enjoy living there.
Sure, and I’m glad you can derive satisfaction from the idea of chasing them out of California, but if that’s all you’re hoping for from tax laws then you’ve set the bar too low!
I’ve seen the “one person selling lots of stocks in an otherwise healthy company to raise cash tanks the market” claim repeated so many places as one of these “everyone knows this, it’s obvious” facts, and yet it never seems to play out that way to any meaningful degree. It’s one of the many Big Lies of capitalism that we’ve just been tricked into accepting.
You might occasionally see a minor one day dip of a few percent at worst, and even then they’re usually caused by some underlying issue unrelated to one person’s need for liquidity.
I think it's that a large pool of stocks going up for sale with no context seems suspicious. Stocks are inherently a gamble on the future price will be higher than current price, so by selling you're withdrawing your bet which could be interpreted as you knowing that the bet won't pay off and that other ~~gamblers~~ owners paying attention might panic and try and sell too, which then could trigger a feedback loop. New buyers might see a bunch of people trying to sell and then think to themselves the bet isn't a good one and won't buy, making the current sellers reduce the price in the hopes of actually selling off and not left holding the bag
A lot of "could" and "might* in that scenario, and it does play out from time to time (see NFTs, 2008 housing market). It also won't play out if the reason for the sale is known and isn't based on lost faith of the bet
The taxes aren’t on one person though, they’re on everyone. Everyone looking to sell their stocks at tax time => price goes down because no one is looking to buy.
If their portfolios were properly diversified, you wouldn't see that effect on the overall market.
5% is a pretty high wealth tax, so I actually find this credible.
As rough as property tax can be, 5% would be crazy. Imagine being told you owe 25,000 dollars because Zillow shows houses near you selling for 500k...
I prefer the concept of stock secured loans counting as income.
the issue isnt being taxed...it's knowing with 100% certainty that your taxes are just going to pad the pockets of some rich fuck somewhere instead of back into the public good (like taxes are supposedly for), something that's true under both dems and republicans, dems just atleast put on a believable veneer
there's a dozen different ways to grab the $ back from these motherfuckers, the biggest issue there is the US's halfassed federal system gives em 50 different ways to weasle out and ratfuck safely from somewhere else.
I mean I'm middle class and could afford this... sure I wouldn't be happy about it but the idea that it would be so onerous on literal billionaires seems absurd.
Did you just swallow the hook and line, or the sinker too?