{"id":3695,"date":"2021-04-28T19:45:07","date_gmt":"2021-04-29T02:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/?p=3695"},"modified":"2021-10-24T18:22:41","modified_gmt":"2021-10-25T01:22:41","slug":"what-about-a-truly-progressive-wealth-gain-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2021\/04\/28\/what-about-a-truly-progressive-wealth-gain-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"What About a Truly Progressive Wealth Gain Tax?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The idea of a minuscule 1% Wealth tax<\/a><\/em> has been promoted recently, but what I think would be better is a truly progressive tax on all wealth gains regardless of source – whether it be through employment income, capital gains, or gifts and inheritances.<\/p>\n

What reasonable objection can there be to a tax regime which says you can keep 1\/n of the nth $million of whatever wealth you gain, by any means whatsoever, in any given year?<\/p>\n

This would mean (since 1\/1=1) that there would be no tax at all on the first million dollars of income.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second million would be taxed at a rate of 50%<\/p>\n

The third at 67%.<\/p>\n

And so on.<\/p>\n

So an income of $2million (either from employment, capital gains, or inheritance) would yield an after-tax gain of $1000000+$500000=$1500000 for an effective tax rate of 25%<\/p>\n

$3million would yield  $1500000+$333333=$1833333 for an effective tax rate of 39%<\/p>\n

$4million would yield  $1833333+$250000=$2083333 for a net rate of 48%<\/p>\n

And an income of $ten million (either from employment, capital gains, or inheritance) would yield an after-tax gain of<\/p>\n

$1000000+$500000+$333333+…  …..+$111111+$100000=$2,930,000<\/p>\n

for an effective tax rate of 71%.<\/p>\n

And, yes, the marginal tax rate would be unlimited, so an inheritance of $1billion, if paid all at once, would have a marginal tax rate (on the last million) of 99.9% but the amount the poor exploited child would get to keep would still be almost $7.5 million.<\/p>\n

But if the transfer was spread out over several years the tax impact would be a lot less – which might perhaps provide a useful incentive for effective succession planning!<\/p>\n

The revenue (and taxpayer impact) of such a system could easily be adjusted by just changing the tax-free amount and step size from a million dollars to some other amount (such as, say, $100k)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The idea of a minuscule 1% Wealth tax has been promoted recently, but what I think would be better is a truly progressive tax on all wealth gains regardless of source – whether it be through employment income, capital gains, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[256,257,254,255],"class_list":["post-3695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-inequality","tag-redistribution","tag-taxes","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3695"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4360,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695\/revisions\/4360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}