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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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I've been arguing this whole time that

  1. A wealth tax doesn't affect risk tolerance
  2. A capital gains tax reduces risk tolerance

Have you??? Then why does your model predict that a 99% cap gains tax cause people to put everything in stocks instead of bonds? You literally said 'capital gains taxes cause increased risk tolerance.'

Ah whatever, we’re all dullards. It’s just that I felt you were trying to Euler me, and your errors are not encouraging me to change my priors in future discussions that involve equations I don’t quite grasp. However, you’ve been nothing but graceful and civil, so let me try one equation.

U = ln(wage * labor - poll_tax) - labor

Why is the poll tax wedged in that parenthesis? It has nothing to do with labor or wage, it should be outside.

I believe the following is a more traditional view of poll taxes in mathematical form:

Let U be the daily utility function of a worker

Let W be the hourly wage in utils for work performed.

Let L be the labour in hours

Let I be the utility gained from idleness, hourly

(16-L being the hours in the day where he’s not working, not sleeping.)

U = W * L + I * (16 – L)

dU/dL = W – I

So the higher his wage, and the less he enjoys idleness, the more he will work.

Add in a poll tax to his utility function , and you get:

U = W * L + I * (16 – L) – poll_tax

the poll tax disappears in the derivative, and dU/dL = W – I again. Poll tax irrelevant.

Now for the income tax:

U = W * L * (1- income_tax) + I * (16 – L)

dU/dL = W - W * income_tax – I .

The income tax is still there. Increase in income tax results in less labour. Therefore distortionary.

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