Transactional Taxation

Anyone have any thoughts on implementing a transactional tax? I've been kicking this one around in my head for a while, and the more I think about it the more obsessed with it I get. Basically, you eliminate all taxes and replace it with a flat, fixed, constant tax that is applied ANY TIME a transaction occurs, regardless of what the transaction is for. Because this vastly widens the tax base for taxable transacations (no more exemptions, loop holes, etc) you can then have a much lower tax rate that is the same for everyone. This rate is expected to be somewhere near 0.5% per transaction, or 0.25% per transactor. I've only been able to find one semi-decent source discussing this, and even that is starting to become subject to link rot. I tried emailing the admin of the site, but it ended up coming back as a delivery failure. http://apttax.com I really do think this is a good idea. It's so stupid simple even a kid can understand it, yet I can't seem to find a problem with it. Surely it couldn't be that easy, right?

PDF for those that just want to get right to it.

How do you define a transaction, specifically? Are you proposing some sort of Coasian property rights to account for externalities and non-monetary "transactions"? How could a central authority reasonably have such fine-grained visibility over all transactions, or is there a distributed/integrated model that somehow respects privacy? Finally, once you have that level of integration across all transaction systems etc, couldn't you use the data to do mad cybernetics and eliminate the need for cruder redistribution strategies like fiat tax? Like the idea lain, just curious!

What's the point? This kind of system would require extra computational power and makes no sense from a classical accounting POV. If you read Marx, you will understand that taxes inevitably come from surplus labor. So do profits. Therefore the simplest and most efficient taxation scheme is the most desirable (so, taxes on income or yearly profits/revenue are simpler), since it's just a matter of deciding what amount of surplus goes to taxes. Your scheme would also imply that you think surplus actually comes from transactions themselves, rather than from labor.

I like it as long as it applies to wall street.

>>12267 > How do you define a transaction, specifically? This part seems simple. Any time there is a transfer of value from one party to another. >Are you proposing some sort of Coasian property rights to account for externalities and non-monetary "transactions"? Ultimately there would need to be some kind of oracle to resolve non-monetary transactions. Deciding on exactly what that oracle is seems like it would be the difficult part for gaining consensus. >How could a central authority reasonably have such fine-grained visibility over all transactions, or is there a distributed/integrated model that somehow respects privacy? Yeah, the privacy preserving part seems hard. Something like Monero's stealth addresses might be workable, while allowing individuals to produce their view keys in the event of an audit. >>12269 Transactions are the very facilitation of transfer of labor. Why build it on abstraction and cumulative reconciliation? How does this require extra computational power? This seems more like a microservice pipeline rather than massive, bursty batch job.

Your approach means 3 companies working together will pay more than a single big one. Fosters monopolies

mmm, all the annoyance of sales tax with none of the restrictions!

>>12262 >>12268 > You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf. >>12270 this could be the end to high frequency trading whether that's good or not i have no idea >>12273 yeah that doesn't sound good

>>12272 >Transactions are the very facilitation of transfer of labor. What? >Why build it on abstraction and cumulative reconciliation? Because we understand accounting. >How does this require extra computational power? Now when you record some financial transaction, you also have to enter the taxes for each one. It's not as simple as just changing a floating point number, banks have a lot of extra stuff to do for transactions to make them consistent.

>>12256 I would apply this to financial services, but nothing else.

>>12273 If the three companies flow of money is uniform, then they only change goods or services but not money. I think that is the point why this idea won't work in the end, people would simply avoid transferring money and instead create credit everywhere to avoid money transactions. In other words, they will create their own money which is not taxable and thus has more intrinsic value.

>>12256 Many people have proposed this, its a conservative thing. Liberals are opposed because they believe that taking some percentage of a poorer individuals resources is more impactful than taking that same percentage from a richer person.

>>12256 You will be fostering monopolies. Since each transaction is taxed 1 company with no transactions is better than 10 small companies working together and getting taxed each step. I think this is why VAT is only applied at the customer. They must have had the same considerations.

In my country people usually evaded property taxes just by declaring the cheapest company and declaring the property under the name of company... then they would sell off the company and with it the property under it. That way even the normal people that aren't selling huge properties would evade the 20 something percent of the property taxes.

The reason that that ``transaction tax'' is bad, is because (1) taxes are bad generally because they're theft, but (2) if you mean ``tax'' figuratively, as an insurance policy, it's a very dumb insurance payment scheme that does not account for any differences among different transactions. What if the tax is $1. That means I'll never engage in a trade where my profit is less than $1, unless I'm cheating that tax. If you meant a flat rate per the value of the items of the transaction, it's also a problem, because the transaction doesn't create the value of the transacted items, but the diffrerencial value of how much the person giving up the item loses subtracted from the value of how much the person that gets the item gains (for each item exchanged). The value of a transaction is this differencial, the added value to each person---the profit. I'd be more supportive of a flat rate tax that's based on the value of the transaction, i.e. the profit that exists due to that transaction. Of course, this is all assuming that ``tax'' is being used in the figurative sense of ``insurance premium'' vel cetera. Mind you, I'm all for simplifying the tax system. The most efficient tax system that is still a tax system is where each person is charged a flat amount. If you care about the poor, you can always waive it for people whose income is below a certain decent minmum necessary for a certain decent minimum quality of life. Of course, the most efficient tax system is the ``null'' tax system, where there are no taxes; instead, all the roles that the government plays are separated, and multiple organizations are made specializing in providing that service, each competing with each other for free transactions with other persons, where the only profit is made by participating in mutually beneficial transactions (or by self-improvement that doesn't involve anyone else; other people are a great source of mutual wealth, though, so the point about the free market being a major source of mutual profit stands). See, for instance, >>12274 >>17133 If your government is still making money (accounting for it's costs towards defending property rights) off those heavily-evaded property taxes, then the government is obviously overcharging. >>12269 >If you read Marx, you will understand that That's an argument to authority. >taxes inevitably come from surplus labor No. Not ``inevitably.'' Not from surplus labor. Surplus labor (a cost, in fact, a surplus expended of that cost) is used to derive the profit, from which the a tax may be taken. Notice the subtle difference: profit is a value, labor is a cost. Tax is the taking of value. Tax comes from surplus value, in that, if it is taken from more than just the surplus value, the value added is negative, the profit is negative, meaning that the transaction is not beneficial. At that point, there is an unequivocal disincentive from doing those otherwise productive tasks. >Therefore the simplest and most efficient taxation scheme is the most desirable I agree. As I have stated above, the simplest, most efficeint tax scheme is, as I have stated above, the ``null'' tax. The whole idea of taxes, if it has any legitimacy, is that of insurance. Presently, the governments provide varying (fairly poor) levels of protection against various rare or dangerous events. By this logic, property tax, if it is to have legitimacy, is there to protect your claim to some rights about the property against someone else's claim to some rights thereof. Likewise, a sales tax would be for the protection against bad transactions, to restore damages to whichever party was harmed by the bad transaction. (Sorry for the folowing rant-ish bit, it's to illustrate the idea with a concrete example. It ends with the second-to-last line of this post.) The ``eBay tax'' (including PayPal, et cetera.) is %13 (and now, in addition to the ``eBay tax,'' governments are making them pay sales tax, even on used goods, even on postage stamps or currency bills), but if the transaction is bad, eBay simply pays the claimant the amount of the purchase. It's inefficient, because they charge the same rate for all transactions, even though some transactions are less dangerous than others---the less dangerous transactions should have a lower ``eBay tax'' than transactions that are dangerous. And, it's inefficient because they don't investigate the claim; they just pay out the money. This leads to abuse, where someone can buy something, claim bad transaction, get the money and not have to return the item. (I know personally, when I bought a dead-on-arrival item, I tried to return it, but eBay said to not bother with that, and just refunded me the money. I presume they didn't charge the seller back for the item, because the seller would probably want the item back or would be more likely to leave the eBay platform.) (By the ``danger'' of a transaction, I mean the expectation (as in probability theory) of it being bad) Of course, there are many bad insurance policies designed to get the insuree to pay as much premiums, but to try to quibble their way out of paying out any awards for any insurance claims.

I think a good starting point for a definition of "transaction" is in the roots: "trans-" (across), "action". I.e. a transaction is an action that "goes across" agents. I think that the difference between "transaction" and "interaction" is that a transaction is done once, and that's it, while an interaction is a series of transactions among the same agents.

Take a look at the payment statistics from ECB. They publish the number and value of cashless transactions/year from each country and the entire EU as well. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/payment_statistics/payment_services/html/index.en.html Now do your math and figure out the hypothetical tax revenue of such a transactional tax for a given country and then compare that hypothetical revenue to the country's actual revenue. Do you think that what you propose is in any way politically feasible?

Flat taxes have the most negative impact on the lower class and benefit the higher classes. 20% tax off the income and on food for someone poor isn't same as a 20% tax on some twats fifth yacht. So it doesn't actually effect everyone equally.

Great idea! The only problem is what "transactions" do you stop at? Does the transaction of air into my lungs constitute a taxable event? How about taking a piss? Does flushing my toilet constitute a taxable event? Also this opens up a whole can of surveillance abuse worms I think most people would oppose on it's face since it requires you to essentially send in your day to day activities over a full year **or shorter** to the IRS. Just an absolutely terrible idea. Here's a thought, instead of thinking up new ways to fuarrrk a citizen in their ass how about you think of a way to live without a constant need for ever increasing debt which inevitably leads to the enslavement of everyone at cost to you? The only real problem with a fully tax-less society is no one has ever come up with a way to make it work. Old US standards were pretty good though. All those roads you glitterboys cry about can be paid by the government with the added benefit of not fuarrrking everyone in the ass since it all comes full circle anyway. But, no, let's just fuarrrk everyone with even more taxes and totalitarianism.

If you understand Smith, Ricardo, or Marx, then you know that taxes, rent, and profit ALL come from the same pool of value: surplus value. The wage share is the amount of money that workers can use to consume the social product after profit, rent, and taxes are deducted from their product. If you understand this, then theoretically, if you keep the wage share and overall tax rate (tax rate on total surplus) constant, then all of this haggling over how taxation is performed is fuarrrking stupid. If you relocate taxation to transactions or something similar (such as VAT, sales tax) then the various other factors such as wages and prices rebalance and you end up with the same distribution of taxes, profits, and rents. The only reason that people fight over who pays taxes is that, in class struggle, it is possible that the wage share won't be constant. So shifting taxation from the rich to the working class is just a way of reducing wages. Likewise reducing taxation can be a way of reducing wages IF the taxes were being spent on services that workers used. Likewise keeping taxation the same, but spending a larger part of the taxes on things that the rich use and the poor can't use (such as military). The key thing here is class struggle. If the working class is on the offensive and is winning (within the confines of capitalism, such as a wave of social democracy), all that bullshit like progressive taxes is ultimately meaningless. It is possible for the workers to win all the same with a flat tax, progressive tax, or any other scheme. The only reason progressive taxes are floated is that it is a shortcut to seizing back part of the surplus. But it is just as possible for workers to be impoverished even if there is a progressive tax.

>>17259 this. money is literally time