ASU2003

Based on net worth, the top 1% would have to be millionaires. There are 3 million people worth over 1 million in this country. They usually have families and such, so there are a few more people who might be in that 1% by association.

The democratic congressman in my district (who lost) had a plan to tax people based on their net worth. It would make it harder to accumulate tons of wealth, but easier to get to a high level of wealth.

abaya

Sweet, I'd be the first to see us spend a hell of a lot less on 1) defense, and 2) Israel. Any takers? **

**Yes, I am being deliberately snarky, couldn't help it...

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Carno

Nobody knows for sure. I guess we'll wait and find out.

Wealth as defined by what? Total networth?


Wonderful post

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abaya

Yeah, I recognized and admitted that in my post. Having a shitty night in general, chalk it up to that.

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And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
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Yakk

I personally would avoid "net". Just use "total worth" -- it might be far too easy to hide assets with fake debt.

Then again, if you tax the person who owns that debt, I suppose the hiding won't be very successful.

"Your net taxable wealth is the sum of your assets (determined by market price), minus the sum of your net taxable debt. Taxable debt is any debt that the person holding it counts as taxable wealth."

Or something like that.

Ideally you would want to charge for each asset "once", and you would want to charge for both assets owned by citizens, and assets owned by non-citizens residing here.

You could place the wealth taxation within corperations, and make equity in the corperations tax-free (because their assets have already been accounted for). Possibly an corperate minimium tax (based off a corperation's market value) to detect fancy-pants hiding of assets (people think the corp. is worth 1 billion dollars, but it only has 100 million in taxable assets...).

Tricky stuff.

Note that this doesn't have to be a change in tax rates -- it can be a movement of taxation instead (from income to wealth).

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

smooth

same place you got the income data:
US Census.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/wealt...00_tables.html

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Xera

The rich keep getting richer, the poor keep getting poorer, and the middle class is disappearing. Now I understand this problem, because it's pretty well spelled out on the evening news relatively frequently. I'm not an economist, I tend to get a headache when I reconcile my checkbook at the end of the month, but I do have a question.

Doesn't it seem likely that the trend of rich people getting even richer and poor people getting even more poor could have something to do with the increased number of companies that are outscourcing their work? I mean doesn't it seem likely that the fact that I have difficulty calling customer service for ANY company and speaking to someone whose native language happens to be English might have something to do with this? Isn't that situation designed right from the beginning to save the rich people a LOT of money in salaries and benifits, while also insuring that there are fewer jobs for American people? and woulnd't that have a pretty big impact on all those numbers and graphs in the previous posts.

Again I don't know what I'm talking about. Please don't be offended if my question shows a total lack of understanding and education on the subject matter, I'm curious, but totally ignorant.

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