Can you explain more why the tax rate on the risk-free-rate portion of investment income should be 0? A positive rate here implements a proxy wealth tax (without raising the reporting problems of a direct wealth tax), and a nonzero wealth tax might be part of an optimal tax policy (e.g., for the lots-of-small-taxes argument, if no other reason).
(I’m not sure that this is right, and am mostly asking this question from a stance of exploratory uncertainty.)
This is basically the argument in my second bullet. You can make what you will of that argument, I think I still believe it—taxing savings just seems strictly worse than a similarly-progressive tax on income.
(I also don’t much like a wealth tax for the same reason.)
Separately, I’m not entirely convinced by that second bullet point—it seems like a non-omniscient state planner in a non-stationary environment would benefit from being able to determine the desired level of redistribution after the wealthy have accrued their income as wealth, rather than needing to get it right as they earned it.
(I’m assuming away the confiscatory impulse here, naturally; in practice, the political economy of confiscation causes serious issues for deferred decisions about distribution like this.)
Can you explain more why the tax rate on the risk-free-rate portion of investment income should be 0? A positive rate here implements a proxy wealth tax (without raising the reporting problems of a direct wealth tax), and a nonzero wealth tax might be part of an optimal tax policy (e.g., for the lots-of-small-taxes argument, if no other reason).
(I’m not sure that this is right, and am mostly asking this question from a stance of exploratory uncertainty.)
This is basically the argument in my second bullet. You can make what you will of that argument, I think I still believe it—taxing savings just seems strictly worse than a similarly-progressive tax on income.
(I also don’t much like a wealth tax for the same reason.)
Ah, that makes sense.
Separately, I’m not entirely convinced by that second bullet point—it seems like a non-omniscient state planner in a non-stationary environment would benefit from being able to determine the desired level of redistribution after the wealthy have accrued their income as wealth, rather than needing to get it right as they earned it.
(I’m assuming away the confiscatory impulse here, naturally; in practice, the political economy of confiscation causes serious issues for deferred decisions about distribution like this.)