You know that people pay taxes on the wealth embodied in their house, every year, right? Not even their equity in the house, but the full value - both the piece they own and the piece the bank still owns. Their primary residence is most of the wealth for most of the middle class, so we already have a wealth tax for everyone but the ultra-wealthy.
Tax on hoarded wealth is pressure to make that wealth do something productive. If you can’t get enough return on your invested millions to pay the tax, then you will slowly lose that wealth. Property tax works similarly for farmers and landlords.
The ultra wealthy are exactly the people who should be making big, bold, high-risk bets with their money, because they’ll be just fine if they lose a few million. Yet these are the same people who can live a comfortable, even lavish life off the lowest risk, lowest return investments, like government bonds. The rich say social safety nets discourage poor people from working, and I say that tax-free capital discourage it from working.
Also, very important to remember that wealth tax proposals generally target only wealth over a very high threshold. US proposals have been $10-50M, which seems pretty equivalent to the Spanish implementation.
I’m sure you’ll understand if the rest of us are skeptical of a guy worth $20M arguing against a wealth tax.
I mean, you’re right that restricted shares are a special problem in assessing “wealth,” but that’s why tax laws are complicated and full of loopholes.
- What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.
I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it’s cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.
I came to MySQL and Apache because they were the backend for other services I wanted to start,. Later, when I wanted to build my own, I already had Apache running, so why would I add nginx? I did let other services add sqlite, but have (in most cases) figured out how to switch those to MySQL.
All of that has been running for 20 years. I’m sure it would be good for my dementia-risk to learn how to start ngnix and migrate all those services, but it’s far more attractive not to mess with what works.
University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.
Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.