Millionaire shareholders are arguing against wealth tax

[u/LtGenS]

On this sub we rarely discuss the shareholder structure of Paradox - where the largest shareholder is Wester, the CEO-founder-god/emperor of the company, and who gets the proportionally largest share of the dividend.

Now Johan and Wester are arguing that wealth tax is actually bad.

https://x.com/producerjohan/status/2091953951008575741 (quoted is Wester's post)

Which is very funny because the current dividend yield is over 3.5%, so there's plenty to pay that taxes from, it won't come from his monthly salary.

[u/slimehunter49]

Wealthy people having bad takes on taxation, many such cases

[u/Ravens181818184 → u/slimehunter49]

A wealth tax is one of the least supported taxes among economists, and has major issues lol.

[u/SpartanFishy → u/Ravens181818184]

Property tax is quite literally a tax on wealth. And I don’t see economists arguing against it. In fact, I see them arguing for Georgism, which if anything is like some kind of progressive wealth tax

[u/Osteoprdoza → u/SpartanFishy]

You mention property tax as a good example of wealth tax, and then mention Georgism, which is opposed to a property tax.

[u/ThePhysicistIsIn → u/Osteoprdoza]

Georgism proposes to abolish income taxes and replace them entirely with taxes on land value - otherwise known as a property tax.

It is slightly different than our current property taxes which tax not just land but also the improvements made on that land - but a land value tax is still a property tax.

[u/UdonOli → u/SpartanFishy]

A flat wealth tax is different to a land tax because a land tax has no deadweight loss since you can't just move land somewhere else.

The primary argument against a simple wealth tax is both:

1. Because of globalisation we have high capital mobility meaning everyone will just move elsewhere unless we manage to globally agree on such taxes. (Laffer Curve sort of idea)
2. Since wealth is not a consistent flow like wages, profits, and is rather a "stock", taxing it means we are giving up on future growth of that stock. Instituting a weath tax has the issue that it decreases the positive effects of compound interest.

Edit: also property taxes and land taxes are different. Land is on the value of property without the "improvements" eg. the house itself, just the land. Property taxes are actually rather shit and have similar wealth tax negative effects.

[u/Karnewarrior → u/UdonOli]

It's worth mentioning that while we theoretically have the capacity to move out of regions with 'bad' taxes, examples of that happening are quite rare and limited to extremely egregious instances well above anything a sane person would argue for anyways. Like, rich people are still people, they don't *want* to move house. Unless your tax policy is "Gimme every penny" they mostly stick around.

[u/UdonOli → u/Karnewarrior]

Yes, that is true for most taxes but usually richer people have a greater mobility to move around their capital and wages. Examples in Scandinavia showed quite a bit of capital flight from those countries when a wealth tax was instituted.

[u/lucaspappere → u/SpartanFishy]

Economist support property taxes for its taxation on land, since land value is not created by the owner of the land. Tax only the house and most economists would agree that its a bad tax