Look what happened the last time someone’s platform was basically “I’m not freaking trump and I actually have a college education.” They lost to Trump.
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My goodness. There may be tax fraud?
@garyprob Actually, she beat Trump. The EC intervened.
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You look at the PNW forms they use to get a loan or mortgage, their insurance coverage amounts, tax returns for llc’s and personal taxes - audited financial statements for businesses- plenty of ways for richer folks.
And for Donnie- what he told Forbes he was worth. 
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Yep-- I have a friend with a troglodyte Trump-supporting cousin who answers any reasonable argument with “oh, that’s just your education speaking.” The US is so incredibly anti-intellectual it’s best to not emphasize one’s education.
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Thanks for asking this, I have often wondered how you’d do this. Two thoughts:
- The current scheme is biased against workers whose income is easy to mesaure compared to rich with obscure holdings
- Are the obscure holdings any good? Aren’t the hard to measure assets harder to sell too, and do they make less?
Glad to see all the thoughtful answers already
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A difference that makes no difference.
This is a problem?
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If they’re not being honest, yes.
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That just isn’t that big of an issue. Yes, valuing things is hard, but we do it all the time.
First off, depreciation isn’t a major concern. Assets that depreciate just aren’t worth that much. Financial instruments, collectibles, and real estate are much more valuable than anything that depreciates. And if there was a “super rich” person whose holdings were primarily in depreciating assets… problem solved, they aren’t going to be super rich for long. Appraising art and collectibles is already super common for insurance purposes, while land is already assessed for property taxes. It is harder to assess Mark Zuckerburg’s private island than Bob the dentists mcmansion, but it is not that hard. Financial instruments almost always have some estimable value. It isn’t quite so easy for closely held private companies, but still not that hard. If a company has recent stock offering (i.e., received investment to expand), you can use that. If they haven’t then revenue, profit, and growth rate are pretty good proxies for the company value.
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While not ideal it is probbably ok. Mr… Super Rich guy with 20 to 50 antique cars might have $5mil in cars bought cheap (probbably to refer, not 62 years ago), but with over $50mil of wealth we are still only failing to capture “our” 1% of 10% of his wealth…so he gets away with 0.9%, which is still better then the 0.0% we have now isn’t it?
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Sometimes you can get a fair idea based on what they insured it for. Then again, if you’re fabulously wealthy you might not bother with insurance anyway.
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Actually, the Swiss tax wealth at a touch over 3% for values over about $3m. That’s not exactly a jurisdiction run by raving communists and is considered quite wealth friendly. One of their secrets is that taxes are well spent, considered a natural personal obligation to.society, and if you are fair with the tax department you can bypass a lot of the paperwork and just work out a fair figure with your tax commissioner over coffee. All very civilised, really.
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Yeah would love to see that corvette previously mentioned valued at 100 dollars get smashed and the insurance company cut a check for 100 bucks.
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This was one of the ways Trump was able to transfer wealth from his father to himself with minimal tax consequences – by transferring properties that were grossly undervalued (by 100’s of millions of dollars).
Nor is he the only one to game the system thus. There are some real problems with the way in which"Fair Value" is assessed.
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“The plan – which is similar to tax regimes in Spain and Norway…”
Can’t be that complex, if two other countries have been able to figure it out. Kind of like healthcare, there are plenty of bright minds available who could figure out something workable–what is missing is a sufficient quantity of political will.
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And miscellaneous objects, even valuable ones are not usually a source of income. Because it is income producing wealth that is the problem that drives increasing inequality, not static stores of wealth. So perhaps we could only tax the income that wealth produces. Oh yeah, we do. but for crazy reasons we tax capital gains at a lower rate than we do wages. Perhaps we should simply tax capital gains at the highest marginal tax rate.
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Yeah HFT is basically automated “front running,” and just adds to the costs of allocating capital which is the REASON for the stock market.
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Uh, yeah, I guess that was my problem.
Once one accepts his premise how much support of that premise does one need?
Its not complicated, we have tax authorities at scale to determine quantifiable wealth as is. The argument is trying to say “we could never capture a majority of net worth so we cannot tax wealth” when even the deepest red states not only charge a decently large property tax, they have sophisticated audit systems to capture the value (because turns out government does need the accurately assessed tax money to run).
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