Jonathan Blow talks about taxation 

it makes me so mad, raising taxes that way is basically how you become a banana republic. People that have money just pull out of the country entirely and move their riches elsewhere, then your GDP starts falling because production capital is gone. socialists are so stupid.

You could also call it the “I don’t care who the IRS sends, I am not paying taxes” effect

@@CHURCHISAWESUM The other cause could possibly be that higher taxes simply lower the GDP or push people into lower margin industries that get taxed less anyway.

Technically it's paid by loaning currency into existence. The US is a unique case, being the holder of the global reserve currency though. Most countries inflate themselves into economic basketcases in a matter of years by doing this, while the reserve currency holder is essentially at the head of a global confidence game and everyone's in on it, so they can get away with debasing their currency for generations, sometimes centuries. So long as enough demand for the currency is structured into the financial system. The debt isn't "real" either, the lack of any hard commodity link means it can be created by any bank issuing a loan. All that matters is whether other banks & central banks recognize the validity of the loan and consider the bank sufficiently capitalized for the amount of debt it has issued. It's just numbers in a ledger, there's no transfers of anything tangible or scarce.

Which is why I think taxation is punitive in many cases

@@hifumibestgirl They aren't shy to admit much of it is just behavioral control and "soft banning". Often a way to circumvent explicit protections in the Constitution or prior case law which hinder outright bans.

TIL. Thanks

Depends on what you mean by "0% tax." The United States lasted nearly 100 years with no income tax. During the Civil War, the first income tax was imposed temporarily to help pay for the war. It was done away with until 20-30 years later when it was reinstitute sometime in the 1890s. Of course, no income tax didn't mean that the people weren't taxed at all.

@@tannerted Yes, there were many other types of taxes then. Mostly import/export tariffs.

Governments can have their own businesses. Taxation is not a hard requirement.

@@youtubeenjoyer1743 Sort of. Government can have businesses that compete in global markets, but they're virtually always de facto monopolies in their local market due to granting itself extralegal privileges. They tend to stagnate & require awkward, highly artificial incentivization schemes to promote innovation... which tends to either fail due to too few bonuses or braindrain their country into the govt zaibatsus, making them economically brittle and far more vulnerable to political whims due to lack of separation between private & public. Govt businesses tend to stunt the growth of their nation's economy. It's like having a cheater in the market, competing to snatch up valuable labor resources. Saudi is a quintessential example of this stagnation effect, which is why they're desperately trying to jump start other industries through artificial injections of cash from oil sales.

Yes, though you are unlikely to do that if you have to pay taxes on each sale. But GDP is an easily manipulatable measurement, and it was originally meant to exclude government and military spending, but that's included now. The Soviets measured their economy in tons of steel produced, appartments built, oil refined, and such metrics. This was more exact, but also more complex to analyse.

Also GDP includes money made in the stock market, which it didn't used to, which isn't production at all, just pure speculation

​@@Feral_Pug_Codesit's capital gains

No, it's a measure of how dependent the subject citizens are on central state fiat currency to maintain trade and their livelihood, if you live in an amish community for example and partake in trade not through fiat currency but arbitrated by your bishop you are making the GDP lesser by being less dependent on fiat, increasing your ability to survive in the absence of the central state, which makes you more likely to succeed in a scenario of insurrection, which the state wants to deter.

​@@Feral_Pug_Codes that's literally false lol

It's a turkish lamp.

Haha, me too! I've tried a bunch of times to find it! I'm pretty sure he even said one time where he got it, but I can't remember what stream it was, so I'm out of luck.

He told me once but I immediately forgot the name

Ottoman/Turkish mosaic desk lamp, I reckon.

Thanks all!

Economic downturns happen every 5-10 years without fail. It doesn't matter what the policy is.

Budget deficit also coincides with inflation, so doing it to prevent recession just substitutes it for another problem. This is what happened to Argentina.

Or maybe it would make your rent a few hundred dollars higher and make it even more impossible for young people to own a house. Part of why rent is so high is because of how expensive it is just to own a home.

@@MetroAndroid most economists agree a land value tax cannot be passed onto renters, bc the supply of land is ineleastic.

@@MetroAndroid an LVT, along with upzoning, would result in massively more housing being provided. renters and new buyers would also massively benefit. the LVT would prevent the new developers/landlords from becoming slumlords and siphoning away the wealth of renters.

​@@MetroAndroid Maybe, but most of the working poor and middle class would be way ahead when they're not losing 20-30% of their base income off the rip. Rent generally accounts for 25-35% of costs for the avg person. LVT would also decrease the value of land across the board by making it a tax disadvantaged investment/speculation medium. Initial price of most real estate would fall, likely significantly. Likely it would work out to a similar monthly cost for anyone with a mortgage, but anyone who owns property outright would face higher ongoing maintenance costs. Trading income tax for LVT would likely present as a wealth transfer from landowners to working class, from older generations to younger generations, and from corporations to individuals. There are a mix of pros and cons to LVT. Income tax is basically all negative, discourages people from working while LVT discourages using real estate as an investment and should mildly increase demand for housing due to increased working class income. LVT is also weird because the "value" of something can only be determined in a market and land is not fungible & is not sold very often, so LVT, like property tax, is largely arbitrary and arguable... though it can be very roughly estimated by sales of nearby land with similar attributes.

🔰👀 this one sees the cat!

That isn't reflected in reality, at least in such a simple and direct way. When capital gains tax was lowered to 15% investment did not increase, because those with the excess capital to invest were already investing it anyway. People don't keep their excess cash under a mattress with zero appreciation just because they'd otherwise have to pay out a portion of their appreciation - so until the tax is high enough to make risk adjusted returns lower than a bank deposit, they tend to keep investing (and if banks had that much more spare cash under management, borrowing costs would decrease, lowering the cost of borrowed capital in turn). While the lower tax appears to lower the cost of capital, given a world where excess capital is finite, the overall supply of cash for investment remains the same. Thus the only real effect is that more investment funds go to the government upon sale instead of becoming available for reinvestment - this is the only area where investment is "stifled," but tuning the balance between further capital investment vs. redistributed liquid cash supply for spending is a different matter of economic policy. As far as home ownership, tax law is extremely generous for primary residences, and defers capital gains recognition almost indefinitely - if you don't sell it, there are no realized gains, and if you do sell it, you can generally defer the gains (simply keeping the same cost basis as the first home) so long as you use the proceeds to buy another primary residence. The proposed unrealized capital gains tax would only apply to those with net assets over $100M - in other words, a wealth tax for the upper echelon. While I haven't actually seen the data, I'd bet BIG money that all such people already own their home ;) There are myriad arguments for and against such a wealth tax, but stifling investment and home ownership are not really among them... unless you know people who have decided not to start a world-changing business because they'd only make $1B instead of $10B :D.

​@@CaptTerrificthe flaw in your argument is that wealthy people don't have to pay taxes on unrealized capital gains when they can just move to another country that will not tax them on unrealized capital gains. Your final premise is therefore a false one. There is plenty of historical evidence to suggest that people often choose to flee to tax havens instead of losing 90% of their wealth, as you suggested. Yes, I do think people will do that for $10 billion.

@@alphaclam this falls under the "myriad arguments against" that I referred to - it doesn't refute my argument, because I was only speaking to investment effects

@@CaptTerrific This does "stifle investment." That's why your argument doesn't make sense.

@@alphaclam I'd imagine they can invest just as easily while living abroad with their money in grand cayman... but I've been known to miss things :) What issue did you see?

and likewise - the smaller the gov't is the better. That's why I moved to Somalia!

@@kecksohnsmall govt better? , wasn't half of Somalia's population at risk of starvation last year? no one argues that biggest govt is good everyone agrees its bad but it's next level stupid to believe smallest govt is best when we live in a modern world with modern infrastructure and modern threats to our continued thriving or surviving.

@@defos8692c I was mocking the op

gdp/capita does fuck all to an individual resident on its own. It's practically useless in that sense unless accounting for several other factors such as inflation, wealth distribution curve, social services provided by the government, etc.

I'm from argentina, it is not that easy. It involves a lot of sacrifice.

Smart people can see patterns

He hates you stop coping

You are probably getting duped by political misinformation. Buffet pays many orders of magnitude more taxes than his secretary. You are talking specifically about 1 flavor of the many many tax flavors, the tax on your salary. Since Buffett pays his secretary a much higher salary than himself (with the company he built from nothing over his entire life), she has to pay a higher "salary tax", that is the kernel of truth that sustains the meme

@@SolarPlayer The anecdote comes from Warren Buffett himself, so apparently he believes it.

@@georged8644 Buffett was talking specifically about income tax, not all taxes across all of his holdings. Even if all of his investments were long term capital gains, taxed at 15% of gain, he would still pay orders of magnitude more tax than a salaried secretary who makes perhaps 100-200k/year if she's very well paid. His point is that income tax is regressive, discourages people from working and punishes the working class, not that capital gains should be increased. Investment is a type of work though, allocating capital to the most valuable locations is the biggest multiplier on the productivity of a basically healthy economy. Getting capital to intelligent entrepreneurs with businesses that build value by improving quality of life is fundamentally an incredible good and the means by which advancement occurs, but there are many failures of human nature that introduce friction and misguidance to this process... manifesting as myopic government interference and predatory behavior by some groups.

​@@georged8644 Yes, he believes what I just explained, I'm aware. And then a trillion political propaganda outlets quote him and present it as if he pays less total taxes than his secretary which is blatantly false and that is almost certainly where you heard it. You would probably agree with me instantly if I was pointing out blatant misinformation on the other side of the political aisle btw, just try to be critical of your own tribe as well

what..what are u gonna do, move to mars?

@@lucy-pero yup, that's the only alternative. derp.

@@aslkdjfzxcv9779 yeah.. it kinda is.

Printing more money will decrease the value of your currency and it may lead situation to hyper inflation 😂

@@aunabbas8582 you realize they are doing both at the same time right now, right?

If you judge tax policy on whether it's intended to improve society instead of on how it actually affects reality, you shouldn't be qualified to vote.

You are not very intelligent if that's all you gleaned from this

bot

That's not an argument, bring something to the table.

The question is, do you know anything about it.

Clearly

Here it is the Dunning-Kruger.

What you smoking brah? This is the dumbest take I have ever seen. You are saying people who are living a self-sufficient life shouldn't be allowed land, while corporations levying a profit should be able to hoard all the land. Wicked.

That'll only make the problem worse, huge corporations can afford basically any land tax you throw at them, it's the independent homeowners and small businesses owners that this will really hurt, eventually just making them sell their land (or not be able to afford it, if owning land is no longer a thing under a new system) to larger and larger conglomerates.

this is like saying that indigenous self sufficient tribes shouldn't exist. Your mindset is insane.

nice try WEF

@@David_Box just make the tax progressive, problem solved

@@MrFram like with basically any progressive tax rate, that changes very little. Regardless of what the tax rate is, within reasonable bounds the same amount usually ends up being paid, as per the graph shown. The cost is passed down to anyone else interacting with those taxed more in an economy and eventually homogenised.