tax time again
sometimes i get these niggling ideas that wiggle and jiggle and tickle inside my brain and just won't go away. the one at the surface today is progressive wealth tax. it basically works like this. claim your net worth. pay 1% tax of everything in the first tier. pay 2% of everything in the second tier. and so forth. the tier boundaries are defined from a tier factor. which the government calculates in order to balance the budget. according to my calculations this would be around 4. let's call the median net worth W. which is around $90k. the first tier starts at 4W. so you'd have to pay 1% of everything over $360k. plus another 1% of everything over $1.44M. plus another 1% of everything over $5.76M. plus another 1% of everything over $23M. and so on and so forth. eventually you get up to warren buffett and bill gates levels. still they're only paying 8% on wealth that averages gains of well over 10%. so instead of making $5b per year. they'll only make $1b. my heart bleeds. sarcastically. our taxes would be in the $20k range. which is a whole lot less than the $70k we typically pay. though that'd go up as wealth gets syphoned away from those that hoard it. and we'd have a balanced budget. the basic premise here is: don't bother taxing people until they have something worth taxing. like duh.