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[–] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Imagine if I had a collectible Lex Luthor action figure which you really wanted - you would be willing to pay me $100 for it. Then you stopped thinking that superhero stuff was cool and didn't want the action figure anymore for more than $10. What has changed about the world is that I no longer have the option to get the $90 difference from you by selling the action figure, but only because you would keep the $90. No money went anywhere. However, market value was reduced. If my action figure and your money were all that existed in the world, then the world would no longer be a place with $200 of value. It would now only have $110 of value, and in that sense it would be a worse place to the extent that market value corresponds to happiness or abstract utility.

Wealth is not a conserved quantity. You can reduce my wealth just by wanting what I have less, even if afterwards we both have exactly what we had before.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    That explanation right there is why a "wealth tax" is much more difficult to implement in any meaningful way that proponents of it like to admit

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    But billionaires still want to live fancy lifestyles. Tax the methods they use to create cash flow, ban a lot of the tricks they use to manipulate stock valuation (the Tesla valuation is fake, etc), and a lot of that problem goes away. Like taxing the use of collateral in loans (easily treated as advance in capital gains tax on the asset you took a collateral on).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Taxing the use of collateral in loans would hit anyone with a HELOC. Like I said, it's more complicated than proponents like to admit.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    As I've mentioned elsewhere that I talked about this, allowing for exceptions specific to improving the asset (home renovations, etc) and certain similar "pro-social" uses would be possible. Would require some basic audit to show what the money is used for (and set caps so you don't get billionaires "renovating yachts" via a friend's company)

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