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How to convert between wealth and income tax

129 pointsby bifftastictoday at 3:43 PM418 commentsview on HN

Comments

bogotatoday at 6:47 PM

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jasonmp85today at 5:15 PM

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clear-octopustoday at 3:58 PM

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ajjenkinstoday at 4:05 PM

This is wrong. You can’t convert between the two because it’s possible to have a lot of wealth with very little (even zero) income. Billionaires can completely avoid income taxes by paying themselves a very low salary and instead borrowing money against their assets (usually stock), which is not taxed as income.

Source: The Second Estate by Ray Madoff (2025)

kingstonedtoday at 3:52 PM

If you want to understand why someone would even propose taking from the rich and complain about inequality, this post titled "Inequality Talk Is About Grabbing " is illuminating: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/inequality-is-about-grabbin...

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ineptechtoday at 7:36 PM

Always a pleasure to hear capital explain to labor why taxing capital is bad, but this seems like a giant red herring. I don't want a wealth tax so I can cut my income tax, I want a wealth tax to address inequality. Our existing policies have produced a very bad bad outcome - wealth inequality exceeding that of pre-Industrial England led by a small, essentially randomly-selected group of people so wealthy that they effectively run everything who have entirely captured a corrupt government and are very close to making the situation permanent - and a wealth tax is the only policy idea I know of with any chance of changing that.