Quirky thoughts from an old man.
When you put the 2 words ‘The’ and ‘IRS’ together it spells: “Theirs…”
It is time to file for your extension.
The view from our lovely rental house in the Sonoma area last December. VRBO
My opinion on taxes is that they are not high enough on everybody. I have specifics but they are as unrealistic as your ideas. 💡
Simon’s five excellent tax proposals summary:
All together all if these proposals would raise near a trillion dollars in new revenue annually for the Federal Government. Which is just about enough to balance the budget. There is no chance that any of them would pass. It is easy to voice concern for the homeless or the underprivileged but it is impossible to tax the people who have the money. All you need to do is study the history of “Carried Interest” to understand.
Carried Interest allows Hedge Funds to avoid billions in taxes. Both President’s Obama and Trump said they were going to change the rules that allow carried interest when they were campaigning both backed down when they were running the government.
I asked a Biden supporter the other day if he was in favor of the Democrat platform proposal to tax capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income. His response was: “It will never happen. It was just a campaign promise.”
So there you have it the wealth of this country (and the world) is mostly held by a small percentage of the population and that small percentage is not willing to give more of it to government.
My solution is to grow the size of the economy and not worry to much about the distribution.
Click the link above to read the details on this tax revenue idea. I was working on solving freeway congestion and making controlled access politically acceptable but it is also a great potential revenue source for financing new road construction.
The Extra Bathroom Tax
Before I arrived at the second home tax I was thinking about an extra bathroom tax. In fact I was even a bit more radical than that. We have lots of spare bedrooms and spare bathrooms.We have about a half a million homeless people in America by recent estimates. The answer is clear, we should tax the extra rooms or let the homeless move into them. This is a very progressive and caring idea. For many the virtue signaling reward from having a homeless man living in the spare bedroom will more than offset the inconvenience.
Some people will object so we can let them pay a tax. Perhaps $100 per year for the first extra bedroom or bathroom and and increasing rapidly after that. So that a couple living in a four bedroom, four bathroom house would pay about $3000 a year in “Help the Homeless Tax.”
Estimated revenue after we caught all of the cheaters: 15 Billion Dollars.
This is the big one. Two hundred years ago peoples main assets were in farms, land and homes. Now because of our new economy most of our assets are in stocks, bonds and bank deposits. They should be taxed as assets in the same way that real property is taxed. The publicly traded stocks in the USA are worth roughly 35 trillion dollars. One percent of $35 trillion is $350 billion. now we are talking about real money.
There are nine million families in the United States with second homes. How about an excise tax on all of them. Starting at $100 on a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin to $10,000 on a big second home in Aspen. Estimated revenue Ten Billion dollars. It can be spent on helping the homeless.
The Federal Government is spending far more than its revenue. It doesn’t seem likely that they are going to stop the spending so we are going to need some new revenue. Over the next few weeks I’m going to propose a few ideas I’ve had that might work.
The first tax is an Excise (Sin) Tax on video games and app store games. Concert and sporting event have added taxes as do liquor, gambling and hotel rooms. Games like Candy Crush and Freecell are addictive and expensive. Why not tax them for the children.
Expected revenue 50 billion dollars per year.
Next week Taxing Second Homes
“The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.”It is Time to Eliminate the Income Tax.
The Federal Government needs lots of money and they get most of it through income taxes. Unfortunately income taxes distort behavior, are volatile and are extremely complicated. An asset tax could replace the income tax. It would be fairer, easier to enforce, less volatile and would discourage excessive leverage. Continue reading “Eliminate the Income Tax”
There is talk about taxing financial transactions as a way to punish those in the finance business and to raise revenue. Without taking sides I discovered today that this idea has been tried before with varying results. I was looking through a baggie of 1930’s stamps that I bought at a yard sale and came across this one:
It turns out that from about 1909 to about 1930 New York State did charge brokers a stock transfer tax. There was also one in the 1960’s and for some of that period the Federal Government also had a transfer tax.
I’m not sure what the rates were in the past but there is no question that if you make something more expensive by taxing it you will have less of it. Financial transactions would move to where they were treated better, maybe Singapore or Belgrade. Is this the result we want? Here is a link to an article that strongly opposes the transaction tax. And another one on the pro side. I’ll have to think about this one some more.