I followed this thread until midway through the second page where it got bogged down in statistics. It’s not that I can’t follow them, but rather that I don’t trust statistical thought, it always fucks you over in the end when you go to trust it.
My experiences in life general show this to be a fact. In China, people dodge tazes through hard to determine Luxury Goods, is it a bootleg Birkin or Kelly, a fake wedge from Prada, the jacket really from Paul Smith, a fake or the real thing? There is a entire IRS taskforce that does nothing else other than harass stores in the places I used to work in San Francisco when I was a security Guard… I worked in the most elite stores, and they all had tax evasion rings, ran by Asian Tongs, intimidating the staff into fear- wondering if the person looking at the stupid $40,000 dollar purse was buying for legitimate reasons or was hired to buy it for someone else. This is what the Chinese fixation of taxing wealth has produced… a entire industry of international gangs that hop international borders to buy goods from another country that was manufactured in yet another country so they can get the ‘authentic goods’ at more reasonable tax rates- instead of having a 300% luxury tax in China, they get a much lower tax here. This is especially frustrating, given most of these firms of French, and they have a fixation on special ultra-luxury items only sold to elites in certain parts of the world, so they get something ‘extra special’. This in turn gets even more fanatical tongs who specialize in this to literally go store by store planet earth over (I’m not exagerating this in the least, they show off their passports and brag to me where they were, and are going) in each of this brand’s name for that super special style and stamped piece.
It’s deeply sad… I know one nitwit from indonesia who has several million dollars in purses- but they look very similar to copies hand sewned on the streets sold to tourists for 30 bucks. I have a friend in Thailand who bouth two special editions ones for less…
In return, there is a second underground underground industry of ‘resellers’ that are not recognized by the industry for deeply obvious reasons- one the tax issue (no, these stores DON’T make money off the resellers, but it’s not a good topic to bring up if the IRS might be listening in a van) and second loosing business to them. Only customers ‘in the know’ know about them, and only because the staff lets them in on it once they bought enough items as ‘investments’. It’s harder to get into these specialty shops then underground bars during the prohibition- the people at the door know the exact texture, stitch (can usually tell who sewned them by name) and will simply not anwser if you ring not wearing the right stuff. It’s completely legal and legitimate- no different than a used clothes shop that people puruse looking for deals- but this stuff is no longer on the market, and it’s stuff that costs MORE than what it used to, because it’s vintage- and the recently wealthy don’t have vintage stuff because they were poor when it was vintage.
So there is this huge international trade network our of Shanghia, Beijing buying untraceable goods- and both the US government and Chinese government is obsessed with it, because that’s massive tax dollars missing from China, and if we can ever get them to enforce stuff on their end regarding our intellectual property, they have to trust us to do their work on their end. It’s mass chaos, and I’ll venture in saying only half of the goods sold ever was bought directly by the buyers. That’s the real currency of the world. You want a apartment complex to go up in Outer Mongolia, you gotta show them the goods… the wife knows, because the other wives know. You gotta have the right belts to be accepted, the right shoes, the right phone case. More than you can possibly imagine goes through these lines of transmission- it’s a unofficial world currency. I don’t think you quite comprehend just how much of the world turns by this- you think ‘it’s just a handful of shops in paris doing this, making these goods by hand’- but they are shops that sell to the top movers and shakers in our world. Not nation, world.
Your not taxing this. Even if you know what your looking for brand wise, your never certain if it’s fake or not. Yeah, sometimes the fakes are blantent- leather purses superimposed and inkjet printed on a canvas bag, or sewened by someone useing bad leather and no concept of technique… but alot of times, especially in the beginning, I couldn’t tell the difference. It’s something you only pick up on- yes, it would be the right technique- and even the right leather- but that style in that year never produced that exact size- if they did make that size, it would come out exactly as that- some very smart craftsmen around the world set up fake shops in western nations.
One time I even brought a craftsman into the downtown, upscale shops down in embarkadero showing him italian shops were selling french knockoffs for 20,000 grand. He was blown away- and he knew his stuff- worked it for decades (it’s on the otherside of chinatown from where we were, and we both were passing through, a three block diversion).
In the end- no… you don’t have a chance of taxing ‘wealth’ realistically- as the wealthy trade in alternative currencies based on nuances in the main currencies. Only the really wealthy know what those things really are- there are cues within and without that determine it’s authenticity. One of the items theives are most mad about are not the items itself, but the boxes they are sold in, or the specialty ribbons, or a printed card. It makes the bootlegs worth that much more… which is frustrating when your stockroom guy is careless and throws away boxes without ripping them up… people get paid to dig through the trash for that stuff. I knew one homeless guy in San Francisco who built a roof in the woods with the stuff… which was a relief, as we thought he was reselling it to the tongs… he didn’t realize how much money his cardboard roof was made of.
Another aspect of taxation is many tax collectors simply are fooled. My old boss in Hawaii was a expert at this- he was even jailed in Africa for a while for his hairbrained schemes. I was hired under confusing conditions, as a security guard in the boonies with a free place to stay for a few hours of work per day- the guy was supposedly running a farm. He paid his workers in cash and drugs- enough money to eat + a rock of coccaine. I was shocked to all hell when I found out, but I wasn’t hired to police the workers, and Hawaiians are generally a heavily addicted population- it wasn’t like every other farm wasn’t full of workers high as shit, just most of them paid in legal tender, and not drugs directly- but that’s how my boss was. I got free internet and utilities, and a free place to keep out theives and keep the tenants paying.
I didn’t realize until after a long while that the main facility wasn’t zoned correctly, and the fucker had a industrial complex where agriculture was supposed to be, and also made a illegal movie studio out in the middle of no where, with a half a million dollar server set up in a food processing plant hidden, and brought in a movie studio than made a TV Show I am very fond of… and then fucked them over and somehow bankrupted them, keeping all their equipment. Just about everything that guy owned was seized from others through fucking evil means, and he had 30 some cars- including a formula one racing car- but none of it was on his books. He didn’t have a title for most- it was people who ‘couldn’t pay their rent’ and had everything seized- but it was people who I now am thinking did infact pay and he just took it anyway.
Anyhoo- that guy gets arrested all the time, people try to kill his family with submachine guns, and one of his tenents running a illegal operation on the site tried to kill me, failed, tried to repeatedly assult me, failed, and finally I called the cops on him… he used the profits form this to buy a facotry in China- in Shanghai- and couldn’t get it working in China, and last I saw him he was trying to con some chinese into buying his worthless factory making shitty sheds that fall over- his property was strewened with fucked up examples of them- sometimes they came out right, but not usually. But the guy- he’s a ‘philantrophist’ because he employs the poor- he’s a farmer feeding the hungry, and he helps people in the third world by housing them. Everything is a scam, and he makes him absurd business run by mass brinbing both party politicians on the island so they will restrain and overlook the enterprise- and had the absurd desire to tell me of other people like him bribing politicians- the local politicians will accept bribes and get it past the muninciple levels, then the state even… but then they get bogged down in EPA and Federal regulations- from Americans and foreign investors, and they will get angry as fuck and demand the project gets approved or their money returned. In the end, it ends with the politicians having guys like me pimping automatic rifles.
I ended up getting myself fired when he kept trying to break me into his ‘deals’ as I was a ‘smart man’ into selling vehicles with no titles, and renting industrial space for propeties in addition to my security. It’s one thing to stay up and make sure people don’t steal batteries as a legitimate guard- it’s another to be the fall guy for that whole operation, all I sold for him were a few sinks, and gratefully accepted getting fired when his estranged son returned hom from the mainland out of the blue. It was a sweet gig, but it caused me to realize just how deeply corrupt our ability to correctly access statistical evidence is. I only found two farms in all the windward side of Oahu that actually grew food (not counting the poultry farms, there are quite a few- chickens eat for almost free in Hawaii and it’s easy harvesting eggs- I mean vegetables), but most of the land is zoned for agriculture. Well over 90 percent of the food in Hawaii is imported, and if a new pacific war breaks out, there will be mass starvation there- next to no foods worth scavenging for on Oahu, and the neighboring islands can’t support 900,000 mouths from Oahu’s population alone.
But- the land is subdivided- accessed with clever statistics. I assure you, there are clever people like Phyllo in Hawaii spouting our numbers. Just don’t expect me to beleive it. Yes- tax is being ‘extracted’ from the subdivisions. However, it’s not fair, balanced, or equitable. The automotive shops get hammered harder than the hiddle shops a few miles away. Hidden currencies, hidden trade, hidden wealth. This happened on a tiny, tiny, tiny Island with major financial issues, and a highly educated tax force.
Carleas plan rests on this:
The Tax Accessor being capable, and the Collectors competent and not corrupt. Your not going to have these two combinations in accurately accessing wealth. Our luxury goods that we’re attracted to evolved in our system to exploit this statistical understanding of taxmen who apply geometry and arthimetic to come to clever, ancient, time proven tax solutions. Our forms for taxing items over 10,000 dollars doesn’t do squat when it’s bought by a nameless frontman pimping a fake ID, or a cleaned up homeless man using a real ID, and then vanishes. Yes- government taxes at least 10,000 dollars- whoo hooo! Guess how much it’s sold for now? Guess what deal it’s given to grease over the wheels of a financial deal involving millions of dollars of resources?
No… computers and smart algorithms are not going to solve this one. No, emphasizing honesty and oath taking isn’t going to do it, or mandating stronger ethics be taught for MBAs. Giving Smears a extra course on honesty and integrity before he’s allowed to take the BAR Exam isn’t going to make him suddenly moral. The problem is deeply saddled at the roots of our system, and it’s not getting better for our tax collecting capacity.
Some aspects of wealth, such as your bank account kind- it’s useful- but it’s going to have the same negative effects as limiting primogeniture, which isn’t illegal in the US- families can still pass on the wealth that way- the Kennedies and Rockerfellers adapted the concept in collective decision making of family estates for example. Other families put individually inherited stocks into larger holdings that the individual still owns the part of. You can come up with alot of systems to get around this, not is it even desireable to eliminate this. Primogeniture is what allowed the mass collection of wealth to create the industrial revolution- banks play off a similar scheme, they amass wealth, and decide how to invest that wealth for certain clients (the money market, bind holding ones) over the average banking client- they guy doing automatic checking through a bank and using a credit/debit card. They bigger investors invest more, and they get hopefully larger returns. In return, the economy is invested in with larger and more complex schemes. It’s how we built the sky scrapers, it’s how we built our trade fleets, it’s how we get the food from the farms and the sea to our grocery stores. It’s deeply difficult, monolithic, and complex.
The goal is to tax productive wealth and NOT HARM IT. You gotta be a good steward to what is best to the survival of a state, a state in return is more likely to be a good state if it looks after it’s nation’s economic health as it’s top consideration. Merely changing from one set of statistical collection of goods to another isn’t going to do the trick, as that system is merely going to degenerate again, and likely this time more quickly, as the rich called our bluff a few hundred years ago when they started building up this scheme. We need to identify what it is in wealth we want to selectively target, and farm it- make more of it, and take a larger percentage of it while encouraging more of it to exist than before. Most importantly of all, we need to make certain what is wealth is what the wealthy- the truely wealthy- the mvoes and shakers making things happen for better or worst, is something they want to openly identify with.
Money is something the famous want to identify, because everyone wants more money, because we all need it. It’s a monocultural system from the bottom looking up, but top looking down it’s more diverse, and the rich have things we wouldn’t even occur to us is imporant, as it’s not even in our expected mindset. They form groups of acceptibility on this basis. Purses and shoes and watched and jackets and cars are deeply shitty reasons for declaring wealth and power- they are a joke at best, I can have the same stuff on the cheap. Isolated communities are another big joke, designer aethetics easily replicated is another.
RIght now- we need to identify what kind of wealth make taxation worthwhile, and figure out how to safeguard it, give it social and economic favor, encourage it, and raise people who possess it to higher positions over scamartists who are getting by on the fringes of advante guarde elitism, draining the living daylights out of the authenticity of the whole system.
In the end, if we don’t, were going to end up in a razor thin paradox like Oahu- importing literally everything and not producing squat. Most farms did stupid shit like gardening or florist boutiques. You can’t eat that shit. A society will starve under such conditions- it’s the main concern of the philosophical community in that state- will there be starvation? Meanwhile… all this other shit is going on with wealth.
Best of luck statistically finding your way out of that maze. I trust so and so amounts was extracted from the economy, but not that it’s accurate of where the wealth is, or of the harm-benifit threshold. Most taxation today is harmful because of where we sit on Ibn Khaldun-Laffer’s Curve. We tax more than the taxable accepts, and wealth is either hidden, or simply not created as the motivation to do so has dissapated. It takes a different kind of philosophy from the perspective of taxation, in legistaling, accessing, and collecting, to get back to the otherside. Merely relabeling what ‘wealth is’ isn’t good enough. Yes, it might be ‘easy’ to target bank accounts, but you’ll find bank accounts will get alot smaller once we start this. You’ll find our legal tender isn’t so useful in a idol-barter culture as is happening with out elites the world around collecting and showing off must have items you and I wouldn’t even recognize. Well, I might in many categories of Items, but you likely won’t.