I’m sorry, I have to get political for a second.
What is a wealth tax?
Think about your life. You go to work every day. The company you work for pays you some money. The government takes part of it. And fair enough, the government has a lot of important work to do with that money.
You take some of what’s left and you buy something with it. The government takes a part of every purchase. Fair enough. The government has a lot of important work to do with that money.
You take what’s left and you save it. The government prints and spends money out of thin air, which technically is a tax on saving money. Fair enough, the government has a lot of important work to do with that money.
So the government already charges you for earning money, for spending money, and for saving money. A wealth tax means that they are now going to charge you for the fact that you could have spent it.
Does that make sense to you?
Say you’ve bought a car. The government has charged you for earning money, charged you for spending it on the car, and will charge you every year a registration fee for owning the car. Now they are going to charge you for the fact that you could have sold the car.
You may argue that the wealth tax is only for the ultra wealthy, to which I would respond that the slippery slope fallacy tends not to be very fallacious when talking about federal spending and taxation, but I’m not actually here to talk about the specific policy.
As a thing to exist, does it make sense to have a tax on earning money, an additional tax on spending money, a third tax on saving money, then to add a fourth tax on having had the hypothetical opportunity to earn or spend money that you did not, in fact, earn or spend?
