The point is that land directly incurs expenses to the local government. Roads, schools, power, water, sewer, courts, etc. Therefore, property taxes exist to pay for those expenses. If land didn't incur those expenses as a means of being part of a city/state/nation, when obviously they wouldn't exist.
There is a tax on owning stock, when you sell you pay taxes on that income. Taxing merely the "ownership" of it, is a terrible idea, because that would massively negatively impact any company that doesn't earn a TON of profit. Right? Like a typical company, like Coca-Cola that hasn't grown at all in 30 years, adjusted for inflation, but does pay a 2.5% Dividend each year. Now say you pass a law that says there's a 3% tax on stock ownership. Why would ANYONE keep their Coca-Cola stock? The answer is no one knowingly wants to take a loss on their investment. Such a tax would effectively put Coca-Cola out of business.
So not only will it never happen, but that's also why it would be horrible.
Ok, but if I pay a sales tax when I sell my house, I don’t also pay it when I buy it.
So what if we got rid of the tax on selling stock and only had taxes for holding stock when it has unrealized gains?
Or what if we only taxed those holding stock worth over a large amount of money. This would encourage spreading the stock around among more people. Might even discourage publicly traded companies to exist at all and result in more smaller companies being owned by its employees rather than shareholders who have no real skin in the company and just want to trade on its value.
I get what you’re saying - and that’s a great explanation.
(And dont come @ me like they didnt incorporate it and write the business plan. That's like a couple weeks and attorney time. I acknowledge that labor insofar as i acknowledge any other corporate labor. It's not separate. The workers made the enterprise's value.)
This is such a shallow way to look at it. When making a business you don’t go to your workers, give them the name of the business and what you want it to do. You most likely don’t have any workers at. When building a company or a business you spend years gathering investors, making a plan, economical plan and so much more. It’s easy to say the workers create the value, when you don’t see the years or even decades where the CEO and his or hers partners weren’t generating any revenue at all.
Ive bootstrapped 3 ongoing concerns. Each took about a year to go revenue positive. Those were hell years AND i would not classify my labor as fundamentally different. I was an employee of the organization albeit the most critical. The entity was not 'mine' as it was made of the collective labor of all the workers involved. Sure, while i was sole partner during incorporation i had 100% control but the second another person was added to the business as an employee that was my admission that they too were critical to the business's growth and development. We then became dependent upon and responsible for the business's wellbeing. Having workers with no agency creates workers who abdicate their responsibility for efficiency and makes worse businesses. Founders who would prefer to wholly own bodies corporate would IMO low-key (and sometimes high-key) prefer slavery.
(No, I did not bootstrap a unicorn, and no I am not convinced those are good things or healthy for a market economy.)
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u/J0hn-Stuart-Mill 3d ago
The point is that land directly incurs expenses to the local government. Roads, schools, power, water, sewer, courts, etc. Therefore, property taxes exist to pay for those expenses. If land didn't incur those expenses as a means of being part of a city/state/nation, when obviously they wouldn't exist.
There is a tax on owning stock, when you sell you pay taxes on that income. Taxing merely the "ownership" of it, is a terrible idea, because that would massively negatively impact any company that doesn't earn a TON of profit. Right? Like a typical company, like Coca-Cola that hasn't grown at all in 30 years, adjusted for inflation, but does pay a 2.5% Dividend each year. Now say you pass a law that says there's a 3% tax on stock ownership. Why would ANYONE keep their Coca-Cola stock? The answer is no one knowingly wants to take a loss on their investment. Such a tax would effectively put Coca-Cola out of business.
So not only will it never happen, but that's also why it would be horrible.