Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
You aren’t taxing with a wealth tax because the person buying it is wealthy. Your taxing it because in a choice between taxing general income, groceries, transportation in general, or luxury cars twice as expensive as the functionally equivalent vehicle you want to choose to tax luxury.
It certainly is a nanny state value judgement but the concept isn’t to tax the wealthy it’s to tax excess.
The other thing is that the tax is relatively meaningless in terms of decision making. If I buy a 150k car today with tax is 157500. With the luxury tax it’s 167500. If that changes my decision to buy or not I probably shouldn’t be buying a 150k car. A 120k car only has a 4K luxury tax on it.
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I think you are oversimplifying things here. Maybe a multimillionaire doesn't care about paying $16.8k tax on a $150k car but if a $150k car is your comfortable max you are all of a sudden reconsidering that purchase and looking at something lower cost. I know a lot of wealthy people that are cheap and do not like to spend a penny more on anything than they have to and many are especially adverse to paying excess taxes. It's just like dealer admin charges as I simply won't pay them for any car even if it's $1k I will walk away as I won't pay over MSRP for a vehicle. These taxes are kind of like Government admin charges. If anything this tax is more of a punishment to luxury automobile dealers as they will simply sell less of their premium models.