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On February 10 2026 16:45 Geiko wrote: I find myself agreeing with oblade for once Most people see the problem, “big wealth inequalities = bad,” and jump straight to whatever quick-fix solution comes to mind, like “tax the stocks,” without thinking through the implications. I think we can all agree that someone having hundreds of billions is a bug, not a feature, of modern capitalism. We can also agree that huge and growing wealth disparities are neither desirable nor sustainable in the long run. At the same time, we should be able to agree that radically changing incentive structures by heavily taxing what fuels the economic engine is a dangerous idea if it is not implemented carefully.
If you conservatively invest into "standard" S&P 500 or similar fonds that are open to everyone with even the tinyest bit of money left over to invest, while still allowing near instant liquidity you get at least 6-8% nowadays... On a classical savings account you get <<1%. Quick math tells me that you would need to Tax the capital gains at over 80% to make it even close to less desireable investment than "classical" (aka stupid) savings/letting money rot in a bank account... I haven't anyone serious seen proposing something even close to 80%.
The maddening thing is, that we aren't even talking about "radical" change, it's that not even tiny changes are seen as possible, feasible or realistic. Taxes on capital gains are just the tip of the iceberg.
Imho we should have significant fees on short term trades to kill daytrading and have a moderate capital gains tax on top. "Investing" should be about investing, not gambling.
Not sure how they would do it, but if it was here or the US they could still keep RRSP/TFSA's (401k/RothIRA) as tax advantaged and have it just hit the non reg part of peoples portfolio. Almost you entire middle class and even upper middle class isn't currently maxing those out so something like this would pretty much only hit the rich.
On February 10 2026 20:13 oBlade wrote: Like I would be open if you had some kind of creative idea like a per-state sovereign fund but this doesn't seem fully thought-out.
State ownership of the means of production? Interesting proposal, tell me more.
Think of it like a public option, but for funds.
Amend the state constitution to codify its existence.
It doesn't work at the federal level because it would have to invest in "America" all the time.
It may not work at the state level either because people move states. So for example to establish who gets dividends, or who gets voting power, you need to be able to say oh lived for a year, or paid/filed taxes last year, and so on, or you could go by something secure like voter registrations.
Possibly mandatory, possibly voluntary. Mandatory would be necessary in the case the richest people wouldn't opt-in because of the tax membership being higher for them and no benefits. But where you vote by one person one vote, as a coop, not by shares. Redistributing the vote in general away from whoever pays more into whatever taxes fund it, towards whoever pays less or none into same. Redistributing the vote, but not the money itself. Which is paid in dividends or on voted liquidity events and so forth.
The cool thing is you can fund it from any tax whatsoever. You don't have to specifically demonize unrealized capital gains. You can tax shiny top hats at 2500000%, for example. That part doesn't matter.
The fund lets citizens participate in private equity by pooling their money into the fund. This gets their money around the accredited investor requirements that this will be the third time you've failed to acknowledge or explain whether you want to tear down to help the 50th-98th percentile enter the 1%. But it also gives them a little more "control" by averaging their contribution (even if their contribution is 0) with wealthier, in a tiered tax system.
The fund then participates in whatever investments that the least corruptible combinations of a voted board, referenda, and state supermajorities pass (details TBD ex. maybe a referendum always gets adopted, but the state gov't moving fast on something needs approval from the independent voter-created board so the state gov't can never just hijack the fund unilaterally).
The same principle as pooling risk for lower health insurance. Coordinate retail trading via the state fund. And imagine up to 50 of them wandering around, one per state. The advantage is it's more solvent than Social Security.
A possible disadvantage is states don't collect the same level of taxes as the federal government, so there's not as much buying power as there would be. Also it's not as liquid because the point is to have access to certain exclusive holdings that inherently aren't very liquid.
An intriguing proposal and I found it more developed than hey dude like tax whenever Musk's bullshit Tesla bubble fake stock worth goes up because it's uncool that one man can like have that much wealth bro.
On February 10 2026 20:13 oBlade wrote: Like I would be open if you had some kind of creative idea like a per-state sovereign fund but this doesn't seem fully thought-out.
State ownership of the means of production? Interesting proposal, tell me more.
Think of it like a public option, but for funds.
Amend the state constitution to codify its existence.
It doesn't work at the federal level because it would have to invest in "America" all the time.
It may not work at the state level either because people move states. So for example to establish who gets dividends, or who gets voting power, you need to be able to say oh lived for a year, or paid/filed taxes last year, and so on, or you could go by something secure like voter registrations.
Possibly mandatory, possibly voluntary. Mandatory would be necessary in the case the richest people wouldn't opt-in because of the tax membership being higher for them and no benefits. But where you vote by one person one vote, as a coop, not by shares. Redistributing the vote in general away from whoever pays more into whatever taxes fund it, towards whoever pays less or none into same. Redistributing the vote, but not the money itself. Which is paid in dividends or on voted liquidity events and so forth.
The cool thing is you can fund it from any tax whatsoever. You don't have to specifically demonize unrealized capital gains. You can tax shiny top hats at 2500000%, for example. That part doesn't matter.
The fund lets citizens participate in private equity by pooling their money into the fund. This gets their money around the accredited investor requirements that this will be the third time you've failed to acknowledge or explain whether you want to tear down to help the 50th-98th percentile enter the 1%. But it also gives them a little more "control" by averaging their contribution (even if their contribution is 0) with wealthier, in a tiered tax system.
The fund then participates in whatever investments that the least corruptible combinations of a voted board, referenda, and state supermajorities pass (details TBD ex. maybe a referendum always gets adopted, but the state gov't moving fast on something needs approval from the independent voter-created board so the state gov't can never just hijack the fund unilaterally).
The same principle as pooling risk for lower health insurance. Coordinate retail trading via the state fund. And imagine up to 50 of them wandering around, one per state. The advantage is it's more solvent than Social Security.
A possible disadvantage is states don't collect the same level of taxes as the federal government, so there's not as much buying power as there would be. Also it's not as liquid because the point is to have access to certain exclusive holdings that inherently aren't very liquid.
An intriguing proposal and I found it more developed than hey dude like tax whenever Musk's bullshit Tesla bubble fake stock worth goes up because it's uncool that one man can like have that much wealth bro.
Man I was just messing with you but that’s a cool story and I’m sorry that it happened.
On February 10 2026 13:33 KwarK wrote: “If we redistribute wealth from the super rich to the rest of society that’ll keep the poor from participating in the stock market”
Taxing the stock market to discourage it will reduce the stock market, by virtue of it having been discouraged by being taxed.
If you give that money to the government, the government will spend it to benefit the corporations that control the government. Not a step up.
On the other hand, even if in magic land you took it and did lossless redistribution to the bottom 50%, they would largely not bank it in the S&P 500. They would use it on consumer spending. They would use it to fix their car or for a deposit. They would get a new computer or set of tools. A select few will all-in GME calls. This is why they call government checks "stimulus" and not "invest-a-bux."
The bottom 50% do not need investments, they need better and more stable jobs first, and they need the drive to work them. But they also need better access to fathers, safer communities, and worse access to drugs. Trying to raise their percent in the S&P500 is like giving dessert to Oliver Twist when he hasn't eaten a meal for a week. People invest when they have steady surplus income. They can have that by being smart and reducing spending, and also by earning more money. But in the long term. There is no long-term fountain of wealth by taxing equity markets. The well dries up. You think everyone will be a beautiful shareholder of the Mag7 when actually the stock market will just look more like Japan or Germany and the exceptionalism of US innovation and dominance evaporates.
So your argument against taxing equities to shift wealth to the bottom 50% is that they will spend it on goods & services...which will lead to the collapse of the corporations?
On February 10 2026 16:45 Geiko wrote: I find myself agreeing with oblade for once Most people see the problem, “big wealth inequalities = bad,” and jump straight to whatever quick-fix solution comes to mind, like “tax the stocks,” without thinking through the implications. I think we can all agree that someone having hundreds of billions is a bug, not a feature, of modern capitalism. We can also agree that huge and growing wealth disparities are neither desirable nor sustainable in the long run. At the same time, we should be able to agree that radically changing incentive structures by heavily taxing what fuels the economic engine is a dangerous idea if it is not implemented carefully.
Capitalism is literally designed to concentrate profits and accumulate capital hence people with hundreds of billions of dollars.
On February 10 2026 13:33 KwarK wrote: “If we redistribute wealth from the super rich to the rest of society that’ll keep the poor from participating in the stock market”
Taxing the stock market to discourage it will reduce the stock market, by virtue of it having been discouraged by being taxed.
If you give that money to the government, the government will spend it to benefit the corporations that control the government. Not a step up.
On the other hand, even if in magic land you took it and did lossless redistribution to the bottom 50%, they would largely not bank it in the S&P 500. They would use it on consumer spending. They would use it to fix their car or for a deposit. They would get a new computer or set of tools. A select few will all-in GME calls. This is why they call government checks "stimulus" and not "invest-a-bux."
The bottom 50% do not need investments, they need better and more stable jobs first, and they need the drive to work them. But they also need better access to fathers, safer communities, and worse access to drugs. Trying to raise their percent in the S&P500 is like giving dessert to Oliver Twist when he hasn't eaten a meal for a week. People invest when they have steady surplus income. They can have that by being smart and reducing spending, and also by earning more money. But in the long term. There is no long-term fountain of wealth by taxing equity markets. The well dries up. You think everyone will be a beautiful shareholder of the Mag7 when actually the stock market will just look more like Japan or Germany and the exceptionalism of US innovation and dominance evaporates.
So your argument against taxing equities to shift wealth to the bottom 50% is that they will spend it on goods & services...which will lead to the collapse of the corporations?
No. My argument is exactly what I took as many words as necessary to express. There is potentially nothing wrong with taxing equities more, or taxing the realized gains of people who have more equities, even more. But if you tax unrealized gains you attack the core nature of what investment is and mess up everything else in the process.
If your belief on the other hand is the government should source money from somewhere, then give the money to poor people so they can spend it in a way that gets it instantly vacuumed back up again by corporations, and that this is a noble and just transfer of wealth and leveling of playing fields and righting of inequality, good luck.
Well, if that vacuuming is in exchange for a decent way of living (aka better food products, housing, heating, internet) due to the consumers having more choice in how they can spend that capital, then yes, I'm absolutely for that incentive. It might actually even make companies more competitive and less monopolistic as the competition can have a fair shot while the big ones will have to actually put in effort to keep their quality high instead of enshittifying everything once they hit a certain threshold of monstrously too big to fail. Also: capital doesn't need to be spent if you don't need to use it. Not everyone is consumed by consumerism.
There was an age of immense wealth inequality, there was a time of huge debts, people solved them back then, and it's not that hard to imagine using same or similar ways of solving it now.
One of the biggest things was breaking up the monopolies, Amazon, Microsoft and Google couldn't amass the money they needed to buy out or crush competition if it was regulated in a normal way, of course, people in the USA have been convinced that these companies being huge is good for them, but given the ways that they dodge taxes and use loopholes that is very much doubtful.
Then you have unions, they have been demonized and eroded for decades, one of the big reasons why we Europoors work much less and have way more rights is because we have people who fight for us, at least we had, we'll see how long.
Next, corporate tax rate, at the peek of the post WW2 era it was 52 %, effective around 40 %, now it's 21 % and much lower when you count all the write-offs, of course, the last time this was touched was by Trump in 2018, as predicted then, it blew a huge hole in the budget and the deficits exploded, at the very minimum that should be reversed.
1950s: Corporate taxes accounted for about 30% of all federal revenue. Today: Corporate taxes account for roughly 7% to 9% of federal revenue.
How do stock buybacks which exploded after 2018 contribute to economy and make America better?
People can talk about unrealized gains and stocks until they are blue in the face, the real answer is taxes on corporations, breaking the monopolies up and strengthening the unions, it worked before, it can work again, yes, taxing investments and stocks can also be improved, but these 3 pillars are way more important and would actually solve many more problems for many more people.
Capital flight is our generation's Laffer curve, crackpot economics used to justify trickle-down economics. Massachusetts has more millionaires after imposing a wealth tax than before.
A lot of things don't make sense about his death, I believe I am very far from being a conspiracy theorist, but from the moment this guy connected to everyone was found dead after the Miami herald article and the 2019 indictment, I was convinced he was killed.
There are too many "coincidences" and he was obviously in bed with and working with or for, who cares, so many shady, powerful and unscrupulous people that believing he just decided to off himself in jail while he was supposed to be on suicide watch is just inconceivable.
Now we have the missing minutes from the video, we have the "malfunctioning cameras" we have the sleeping guards, we have the very violent and pedophile hating murderer trying to kill him before who was moved in to his cell for no apparent reason, and finally, there is the SDNY memo from the day before he "killed himself" saying as much, why and how does that happen, I really can't explain.
What is obvious is that Epstein was a power broker of the highest kind, Ro Khana (good for that guy and Massie, heroes) just read some names, including Les Wexner who was indicted by FBI as co-conspirator as well as the Ahmed bin Sulayem, the Emirati sultan who was the guy exchanging opinions on torture videos with Epstein, there were obviously a LOT of very powerful people who wanted him dead, and one of them was the President of the USA.
On February 11 2026 03:48 LightSpectra wrote: Capital flight is our generation's Laffer curve, crackpot economics used to justify trickle-down economics. Massachusetts has more millionaires after imposing a wealth tax than before.
It's still an income tax, not a wealth tax. You can call it a surtax, since its a second tax on already taxed income (I think 5% on all their income, and then 9% on everything over a million from 4% surtax).
Important because a couple pages ago people were talking about wealth inequality as distinct from income inequality. No state has a wealth tax.
On February 10 2026 16:45 Geiko wrote: I find myself agreeing with oblade for once Most people see the problem, “big wealth inequalities = bad,” and jump straight to whatever quick-fix solution comes to mind, like “tax the stocks,” without thinking through the implications. I think we can all agree that someone having hundreds of billions is a bug, not a feature, of modern capitalism. We can also agree that huge and growing wealth disparities are neither desirable nor sustainable in the long run. At the same time, we should be able to agree that radically changing incentive structures by heavily taxing what fuels the economic engine is a dangerous idea if it is not implemented carefully.
Capitalism is literally designed to concentrate profits and accumulate capital hence people with hundreds of billions of dollars.
So is Communism. Everything is "the people's" but comrade Mao has 45 "W100 Mercedes 600"
Capitalism is a good, progressive mechanism as long as there is competition and innovation.
Lack one of them and capitalism becomes an camouflaged version of aristocracy.
Enshitification, consolidated markets.... and raging inflation because if nothing new of value is created, basic needs (aka advancements of the past) need to generate the unlimted growth.
Norway has a wealth tax. But it's roughly 1%, not 10%, and while I'm not opposed to it*, it's a very hot topic here, and even among people who support it, there tends to be a 'it should be modified a bit'-clause to their support. Some companies that are not very profitable but that have a lot of assets are definitely hurt a bit. Seems like there's pretty wide-spread agreement that startups suffer a bit, because they often have small margins/expect to operate at a loss for a while, yet they might still have to pay wealth tax because of the money that has been invested. At the same time there are mixed opinions on just how bad it is - some studies claim we're the 18th best country in the world for entrepreneurship, others rank us as the 5th best country in the world for startup businesses - either way it's not a total crisis.
(*I think too much wealth inequality is intrinsicly bad, it's not only bad if it leads to poverty because the poor people don't have enough, it's also bad because individuals accruing too much wealth leaves those individuals with too much power, and thus, it's a democratic problem. Doctors making 3-4 times the salary of a cleaning person working in the same hospital doesn't bother me. My middle manager making twice what I made and his boss making 50% more than him didn't bother me when I was working in a warehouse when I was younger. But there's absolutely a limit.)
Now, Norway does not have an estate tax. If I could swap our wealth tax with an estate tax, I'd do that in a heartbeat. While people can argue 'but the money has already been taxed' until their faces turn blue, estate tax strikes me as the least problematic of all forms of taxation. If you have a high enough cutoff, only the very wealthy are affected - people can still be motivated to work hard because they want to provide a comfortable life for their children, and be entirely successful doing this; if someone only gets $600 million rather than $1 billion from their dad I still think he's in a pretty good spot. Additionally, the people taxed literally didn't do anything. Also, Carnegie effect.
Like, if you ask me 'which is the preferable outcome, 100000 people getting a $1000 tax break' or 'one person inheriting 1 billion dollars instead of $900 million dollars', I'm highly inclined to argue in favor of the former. I understand that there can be issues in terms of implementation - but in principle, estate tax (with a fairly high cutoff so people can still inherit their family home or whatever) is the least bad form of taxation there is.
On February 11 2026 07:27 Liquid`Drone wrote: Norway has a wealth tax. But it's roughly 1%, not 10%, and while I'm not opposed to it*, it's a very hot topic here, and even among people who support it, there tends to be a 'it should be modified a bit'-clause to their support. Some companies that are not very profitable but that have a lot of assets are definitely hurt a bit. Seems like there's pretty wide-spread agreement that startups suffer a bit, because they often have small margins/expect to operate at a loss for a while, yet they might still have to pay wealth tax because of the money that has been invested. At the same time there are mixed opinions on just how bad it is - some studies claim we're the 18th best country in the world for entrepreneurship, others rank us as the 5th best country in the world for startup businesses - either way it's not a total crisis.
(*I think too much wealth inequality is intrinsicly bad, it's not only bad if it leads to poverty because the poor people don't have enough, it's also bad because individuals accruing too much wealth leaves those individuals with too much power, and thus, it's a democratic problem. Doctors making 3-4 times the salary of a cleaning person working in the same hospital doesn't bother me. My middle manager making twice what I made and his boss making 50% more than him didn't bother me when I was working in a warehouse when I was younger. But there's absolutely a limit.)
Now, Norway does not have an estate tax. If I could swap our wealth tax with an estate tax, I'd do that in a heartbeat. While people can argue 'but the money has already been taxed' until their faces turn blue, estate tax strikes me as the least problematic of all forms of taxation. If you have a high enough cutoff, only the very wealthy are affected - people can still be motivated to work hard because they want to provide a comfortable life for their children, and be entirely successful doing this; if someone only gets $600 million rather than $1 billion from their dad I still think he's in a pretty good spot. Additionally, the people taxed literally didn't do anything. Also, Carnegie effect.
Like, if you ask me 'which is the preferable outcome, 100000 people getting a $1000 tax break' or 'one person inheriting 1 billion dollars instead of $900 million dollars', I'm highly inclined to argue in favor of the former. I understand that there can be issues in terms of implementation - but in principle, estate tax (with a fairly high cutoff so people can still inherit their family home or whatever) is the least bad form of taxation there is.
I agree, aside just from the redistributory effects of an estate tax. It's also just a damper on dynastic power.
Like it or not, if you are inheriting a billion dollars, you are inheriting a lot of intrinsic political power, whether or not you intend to use it that way.
EPT
