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tax. every. trade.
Abolishing the stock market in general would be nice, or at least moving towards that direction gradually. The wealthy don’t typically get their money from great trading, but parking their money and letting it grow.
The stock market itself isn’t the problem either though, it’s that the wealthy have money and the poor do not. If you want to buy a house and you don’t have the cash for it, you need to borrow from someone…and that means someone who has a lot of money. And you’ll pay interest for the privilege because there is a time value of money. That doesn’t go away without a stock market.
The real solution is to tax the wealth itself, either directly or through taxing the step-up in value after the owner of a stock dies, or a massively increased estate tax.
The stock market shouldn’t be abolished without also abolishing other aspects of Capitalism, yes. Workers must currently take advantage of everything they can within the current system. However, people should be striving towards worker ownership of the Means of Production, and keeping the stock market would allow Capitalism to resurface.
tax. every. trade.
What is the justification for taxing a trade that lost money? Said person certainly didn’t generate an income from that trade.
How much would you even tax for a trade that lost money?
The same justification as when you place a bet on black in vegas, it comes up red, and the house takes all the chips you bet.
You can call greed “rational self-interest” and gambling “speculative investment” all you like, but trying to change the language doesn’t change the reality.
When you’re gambling, you might lose, and society shouldn’t subsidize the days you gamble and lose. Only income derived through labor should be truly safe, as labor is useful to civilization, unlike gambling, often with winnings from previous gambling gained using loaded market influence dice and marked insider information cards.
The closest we come to “society” “subsidizing” stock losses is via capital loss deductions. Assuming you aren’t doing particularly crazy tax shenanigans, you are looking at up to 3000 dollars deducted from your taxes per year. For reference, the standard deduction is 13850 for an individual as of 2023.
But the thing about capital gains and losses are that they are only actually a thing when you cash out of the stock market. This means you are actually encouraged to “sell” your shares in a failing company and use it to invest in a company “on the rise”. Which is actually good.
What you are proposing would, ironically, mean only the super rich would be able to trade stocks to begin with. And they would only invest in the “guaranteed” companies like MS and the like which would hurt a lot of medium sized companies and workers.
Also, this all forgets that the vast majority of retirement schemes (even pensions when you look at where the money comes from) are based on investing in stocks. In large part because the idea is to benefit from an overall better economy.
So yeah… your statement about “betting on black” makes no sense and your proposed solution only hurts all but the super-rich.
But the thing about capital gains and losses are that they are only actually a thing when you cash out of the stock market.
Oh hey guys we can’t tax the wealth of the rich because their wealth isn’t in the form of sequential 2 dollar bills and simon didn’t say so it doesn’t count as wealth!
Of course it helps when Wall Street sends lobbyists to make the tax code work to their advantage.
We should have a wealth tax on net worth, if they don’t like cashing out stock to pay it, tough. It is completely workable, but since the oligarch class owns our government, don’t worry, it’ll never happen.
Also this story directly addresses where most of the benefits of this rigged con-game of an economy goes, and most Americans haven’t had significant pensions for a long time.
Following this line of thought - sacrificed alot and you now own a house (shocking in this market I know). Its value goes up 100k in a year due to forces out of your control. You now owe 30k in additional tax.
Should you now be forced to sell your home if you can’t pay this tax?
Following it further- you have a bank account. You save 20k. You now have an asset that is increasing in value - do you now owe tax on this?
There is a bloody good reason taxes are paid when gains are realised, or more accurately when money changes hands.
No. Primary residences are always protected from tax agents. Nobody is going to be made homeless by a wealth tax. Take your fearmongering elsewhere.
Primary residences are always protected from tax agents.
Primary residences are absolutely not protected from tax agents. They can and are sold to cover unpaid taxes. While it is true they don’t do it often and will sieze every other asset you own first, that commonly leads to loosing your home as well. Good luck paying your mortgage when you don’t have a car to drive to work anymore and all the funds in your bank account are frozen.
"if you have unpaid taxes, the IRS has the right to seize your home through a tax levy. If the IRS seizes your home for unpaid taxes, it uses the money from the sale to cover the cost of seizing and selling the property. Then, it applies the remainder to your tax bill. You can apply for a refund if there’s any money left. " https://taxcure.com/tax-problems/tax-levy/home-seizure
If you mean a small tax per share when purchased then that would be a great idea. Make high frequency trading, that contributes zero to society, unprofitable. It wouldn’t hurt household investors as the tax would be small but it would hurt the assholes who manipulate prices through trading back and forth.
High frequency trading is fully automated insider trading done in broad daylight, but nothing gets done about it because most people don’t understand what it is. It shouldn’t be taxed; it should be illegal.
It’s a long and convoluted route from that to their 401ks not bring as plump as they could be. Indirect robbery of thousands is more palatable than being mugged for a few dollars.
This is an important thing to note when someone claims that you should be eager about stock market performance because of your [comparative handful of] shares in your retirement account. Accounts such as the 401k were probably devised to tie up regular people’s money into the stock market, injecting more money into it and making it seem more important (and thus worth bailing out).
They were devised to get rid of pensions so companies didn’t need to care for their employees, they could just have the option to match input, but retirement was made to be 100% on us.
More bullshit to benefit corporations, but to be honest there are so many scumbags out there and so many pension plans that were stolen from, I don’t know how to feel about it.
It was also devised so that when a crash occurs, the lower classes get wiped out, the rich still have piles of cash, and they get to buy up everything at fractions of a penny on the dollar.
You know exactly how to feel about it. Douchebag MBA’s who think they’re Masters of the Universe gamble with other people’s retirement money. And all those sweet sweet fees…
We should invest in guillotines.
That and it artificially inflates stocks by creating regular buy pressure. Stocks are almost completely worthless unless you get a whale that wants to buy out the company or a large controlling share. It’s not like you can just cash in your share to the company and they give you a percentage of the current value. You have to find someone else that wants to buy it.
This point is huge and seemingly overlooked by most people? Once a majority of boomers start pulling their 401k money I don’t think millennials and gen x will be putting as much money back in.
They really cooked up such a great Ponzi with 401k. I’m sure it’ll get rugged right when we come of age to cash out.
Accounts such as the 401k were probably devised to tie up regular people’s money into the stock market
Aren’t pensions also tied up in the stock market. Yes there’s a difference of who manages and how the contributions are made, but both plans put the security of your retirement in the market in some capacity, right?
Pensions also allocate some funds in stocks, but overall they invest conservatively. By default, most 401k funds are set to a target retirement date fund and early on those are mostly stocks. These funds also often have significant annual fees. Instead of a single large fund managed conservatively, you have many individual funds that are managed all over the place. The common advice is to invest more aggressively when you’re younger, there has also been a huge push toward ETFs which are their own tangled mess and have a potential for trouble in the future, but that’s a different topic.
Are the fees of target funds usually that significant? Vanguard Target Funds have an expense ratio of 0.08%. They say the average comparative fund is 0.44%, which is a bit high for my liking, but not terribel compared to other managed funds. https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-funds/profile/vfifx#performance-fees
Vanguard is good with fees. That 0.44% is an average so there are also funds that charge more. I think fees have come down as 1) more attention was brought to them 2) Such funds became more computerized and straightforward to manage. Still, a 0.44% average fee each year is a significant chunk of change.
I fully agree on .44% being high. I raise an eyebrow on anything over .10%. But if you follow the old reddit personal finance prime directive… You should max out your 401k inso far as you maximize the employer match. Then max out your Roth IRA where you hopefully have access to better expense ratio target funds. I have been trying out the 0% Fidelity index mutual funds as opposed to older S&P500 funds to maximize potential there.
I haven’t really looked at the robo brokers though. What are fees like for betterment and the like?
Either way, I think people are shooting themselves in the foot for not investing in index funds or target funds out of moral principle. Unfortunately there isn’t much other safety net for your retirement, and you’re probably going to be forced to spend cash for everyday goods from major corporations. Might as well try to secure some value of those same corporations at the same time instead of letting your savings constantly depreciate over time.
And you thought Monopoly was just a game!
Half of the game. You’re supposed to end the Monopoly phase when everyone gets frustrated, and switch to the Prosperity rules.
Close.
Halfway through the game you’re supposed to end the Monopoly phase and switch to eating the rich. This redistributes the wealth and allows everyone a fair chance again.
Don’t worry, it’ll trickle down… Annny day now.
I can already feel it trickle on me! No wait, that‘s asbestos.
Just give it 30 years or so, and we’ll be swimming in that sweet sweet mesothelioma money.
It’s ok though because they sprayed it down with urine first.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
The “Eat the rich” crowd continues to do absolutely nothing.
Unfortunately cannibalism is still unwelcome in society 😔
Just become rich, no need to eat anyone.
Just become rich, you won’t be prosecuted for any crimes.
Historical data would be great. How was that figure in each previous decade? Isn’t it true that at the peaks this tends to happen, and when we get a stock market downturn, the rich get poor faster then anyone else?
Even when the stock market crashes the rich don’t get poor. They can seemingly lose ungodly amounts of money exceptionally quickly but even after all that they’ll still be rich because being rich is a comparison: If everyone on a mountain falls down the ones at the top will still be there.
I mean if we’re talking about top 1% you’re probably right, but I believe in the top 10% there’s a bit of movement. Out from it and in to it from below.
And there are plenty of examples of people going from being extremely rich to being bankrupt and never recovering. It’s not impossible, but probably requires quite a lot of effort and/or stupidity. For instance, when Iceland went based and let its banks fall, this guy went from being worth $1B to -$750m. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Björgólfur_Guðmundsson
I think I crack the top 10 percent income earner I agree (not sure where I am in the USA net worth wise). I don’t consider myself rich, but that is very much in part because I live in NYC, but if I didn’t live there I probably wouldn’t be 10% earner. A big market change could have very significant impacts on my life, housing, etc. Fuck the 1% percent though.
One thing I have noticed about folks that talk about income and wealth in my bracket is that they talk about Stock benefits like options, RSU’s, and ESPP as income. When I was making salary and around folks under 75k no one really talked about those types of benefits as income meaningfully (partially because they didn’t get it or didn’t get a significant amount of it). But for those high income earners in the top 10% that factor their stock as part of their income lifestyle, that puts them more at risk for greater income swings in the event of market crashes to a certain degree (assuming job loss doesn’t occur).
Click on the link. Literally the first thing in the article is a graph over time.
tl;dr it was about 80% in 1990, and is now 92.5%. Or alternately, the bottom 90% of the population owned 20% of stock market wealth in 1990, and now they own 7.5%, so around one third as much as a generation ago.
Only if you consider “getting poor” going from a $200B net worth to $175B net worth.
Yeah, probably, but now you’re talking about top 0.1%, not top 10%. I mean technically the former is also in the latter, but you know.
My wife and I constantly lament how we were born a few decades too late. For everything
Born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore space. Born just in time to explore Dank memes.
Truly, a time to be alive.
No shit. If someone does not have money they don’t need then they can not buy stocks or any investment.
So many hands
As is tradition.
Cause and effect
One thing the article doesn’t make super clear to me is if that figure includes investment funds and whatnot, and to what degree. It sounds like it might but elaborated very little beyond a vague statistic.
It is extremely vague, because the top 10% of Americans in net worth are those who have over about $850,000.
Tax stock over 100,000 shares 1% per current price, per stock, per quarter.
Guillotine anyone who tries to buy a yacht or private jet.
I don’t think it’s good to have such wealth inequality, but I do this general investment into the stock market should be encouraged.
401ks are so much better than pensions as a retirement vehicle. Better return on investment and more financial separation from the company I work for. I never worry about someone raiding the pension fund or a company going bankrupt, and I’ve received much better return on investments than the numbers you hear from pension funds! That’s not even considering 401k matching…
Ok rich person, or it will be owned only by a tiny few and collapse bc of it.
Your comment makes no sense. Try replying to what I wrote please.
Is this really a new thing? Haven’t the rich always been the stock-holders?
I’m shook!
