Hacker News discussion contests billionaire mobility and alternative tax approaches
1 Sep 24 5:00 PM · 4d ago · 1 article · 2 posts · 38 comments · 3 sources · development 1 of 1
Comments on Hacker News surface multiple competing views: some argue billionaires won't actually leave despite tax threats; others contend land taxes could hurt ordinary homeowners and renters; others defend the billionaire wealth tax as preferable to an untested alternative; and some raise concerns about accurately assessing land value separately from improvements under Prop 13's framework.
“billionaires, unlike land, have feet.”
Center for Land Economics · hn ↗Center for Land Economics Policy research organization
Larry Page Billionaire tech founder
Mark Zuckerberg Billionaire tech founder
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first by HN Best, 4d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people said 24 voices · best of 54 · verbatim
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Two things:1. If wealth was only motivated by taxes and was going to leave, it would've left already. Fact is, billionaires don't want to live in Tennessee;2. Nobody is doing the right thing to tackle any of this, including California.The article mentions California has land and that's the key point. Unfortunately, California homeowners have been…
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The article contains significant inaccuracies. Individuals in the lower and middle economic strata need not advocate for the interests of billionaires or those with assets exceeding $100 million; these individuals have already benefited disproportionately.Over the past 50 to 60 years, wealth concentration in many Western nations—coupled with the…
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I think the author may be right about multiple points but I think it doesn't matter? This is one of those, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good situations. A state-level, one-time wealth tax _is_ something that billionaires can run away from. And this law seeking to apply to people who lived in the state _before its passing_ seems…
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Land, as apposed to the property on it, is raw nature. If we view raw nature as a common inheritance of mankind, then paying a tax on land is how the exclusionary use of it, balances with the common interest in it.Economist Henry George in the 1800's, pointed out that taxing land, but not the property on it, incentivizes efficient use of land…
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I was talking to a friend about the billionaire's tax and this issue came up. Here's how I see it: either individually wealthy people stay here, and we take their money to build state capacity to even out the distortions created by their wealth, or, they leave, and the distortions fix themselves.The easiest one to point to is property prices…
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The effectiveness of other taxes aside, the argument that billionaires will leave if taxed at a higher rate isn't compelling.Billionaires are not struggling to meet their expenses. If you raise their taxes, they aren't suddenly unable to afford things. They don't need to change their behavior just to get by. A carbon tax forces average people to…
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As I see it, the value in a wealth tax isn't just in a cash grab. It's about reining in the behaviour of the wealthy.If you can cap individual wealth to eight or maybe nine figures, you take options like "bankroll major state/national elections on a whim" and "buy up major media and communications brands" off the table. As far as I'm concerned…
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Not sure if anyone could get such a policy change made given that California politics is now just "Whatever the California Democratic Party Wants" and they are very rigid in the ideas they accept.But I think the proposal being discussed is 1000% more consistent with the principles of a free, non-communist society than the crazy "wealth tax," which…
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I don't live in California but the article mentioned Proposition 13 which capped property tax rates and the reassessment is only when the property changes ownership?Is that right?That seems unfair to people who recently moved compared to the people that stay in their house for decades.Reading more it looks like California created alternative types…
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Rent is a function of supply and demand, not a landlord's costs, otherwise we would expect changes in e.g. mortgage interest rates to be passed on to, but in practice we don't see this effect. We also don't see landlords who own their properties outright (and thus don't have mortgage interest costs) charging lower rents than landlords in the…
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The greatest feat that Mao achieved was to take the land that had been tightly gripped by generations upon generations of owners and to shake up the distribution of it so that the land could produce again. People naturally want to work the land, but you end up with suboptimal inertia because owners just end up letting it sit fallow if it doesn't…
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Most land I bet is leveraged (hence the high price!) and taxing it will put pressure on home owners and investors. It is great for the truely rich who have a $50m mansion because it is chump change and will pay $375k which is approx zero but for someone with a typical house $1m it is $7500 which is less money for food and other household expenses…
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> Economist Henry George in the 1800's, pointed out that taxing land, but not the property on it, incentivizes efficient use of land, because holding land for its passive (parasitic) return even when underused, becomes unprofitable when the land is taxed in proportion to the value it can enable.That sounds like a terrible idea to me. Efficiency…
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The billionaire tax is an experiment, they did put the bar pretty high to measure how many families will relocate (that's super easy to track); once that's measured, it's easy to build a model to adjust this threshold to whatever is advantageous for the state and keep things in balance this way, where the outflow is carefully measured and weighted…
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>If we view raw nature as a common inheritance of mankind, then paying a tax on land is how the exclusionary use of itThis will have some of the unfortunate effect of collectivism. We don't want the govt to tax you into poverty.A simpler overall approach (I've left out the nuances) would be to have an equal amount of land per person completely tax…
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That cost will, of course, be passed on to renters unless the rental prices cannot be raised at all.If they can't be raised, and the costs end up being ruinous to the landlords, they will find other solutions like mass arson. That isn't hyperbole; this was a serious problem in the 1970s…
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The land value tax is a good idea, but the pure conceptualization that die-hard Georgists have, in which it's a flat tax, doesn't seem in the same line as the billionaire tax. What'd like is just a (drastically) revised version of Prop 13 in which those protections apply only to the first $N of property value. We can effectively tax the real…
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Property tax increases are hamstrung by Prop 13 and until that’s repealed, will continue to be.And while the wealthy always threaten to leave when faced with higher taxes, the fact is that they never seem to actually do so.The site is based around georgism whose fundamental premise is that taxing land is the universal solution (much like for…
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So a data center pays the same taxes as a homeowner, foot for foot? It seems unfair at first, but then it occurs to me that data centers would not be so desirable if they were not paying higher taxes. If land value tax helped to pop the data center bubble it would make the more off-putting aspects (organic farming is a less efficient use of land…
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I think the point of the article is correct; the issue with CA is everyone wants to live there, including rich people. If we try and tax them then they'll leave just long enough to not pay state income tax, if we tax property values then the state actually gets the tax and doesn't miss out on job creation or future revenue.Red states have…
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The hard part is that we've structured life such that you are on a fixed income at the end of your life in no position really to deal with inflation. At least when you are still working, in theory at least your wages will go up with inflation. This is really why prop 13 happened to pass at all: the idea of being displaced at the end of your life…
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"None of this is really about billionaires; California reaches for exotic taxes because its normal one has been broken since 1978."The author then goes on to talk about CA's property taxes ... but LAND HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE BILLIONAIRE'S FORTUNES!!! Zuckerberg did make his money trading property, he made it through…
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I don't think this assessment is connected with reality. Land on its own isn't valuable, its the labour and investment people put in while on the land that produces taxable value. Just because the land can't leave doesn't mean the value of the land stays. As long as the government spends more than it can collect, simply charging more people to…
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“ Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Don Hankey, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Spielberg, worth roughly $540 billion combined — had already moved their tax residency out of state before the measure”Imagine being worth billions USD and rather than being a part of the solution to support the state that helped build your wealth, you spend your money…
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