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When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

nytimes.com

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Re: When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

#171

Post by msla »

dageshi wrote: post #98
4c2383f5c88e911 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A flat tax rate is not a good idea whatsoever; if you tax e.g. 20% of earnings ,do you believe people who earn $30k a year are impacted the same way as people earning $200k or more? Sure, those who earn more pay more, but it hits them in "extra" earnings, while the poor are taxed on money they need to survive. A (very) progressive tax rate with a few ways of reducing the tax based on social (e.g. number of children,…

A flat tax you only start paying above a certain threshold then? For sake of argument everything under 20k is tax free, you pay flat tax on everything above? Problem solved?

A lot of people would consider that flatly immoral, and as evidence that the poor aren't paying their fair share.

Remember that Flat Tax is also called Fair Tax. The concept of fairness is central.

Re: When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

#172

Post by charlesdm »

jazzyk wrote: post #74
icebraining wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A corporate tax on what? Income, profit, dividends, expatriation?

Could be tax on profit or % of revenue, if there is no profit.

That clearly doesn't work since that ends up being negative for capital heavy businesses (airlines, manufacturing companies, car dealerships). Some businesses generate massive amounts of revenue, but have very low margins + not much profit.

There's a reason why things are the way they are. Redrawing the playing field is complicated and can't be done easily without (business) casualties.

The wealthy pay a decent amount for the resources of society they generally consume, which is fine.

Re: When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

#173

Post by sokoloff »

logfromblammo wrote: post #161
jazzyk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you make the rules so simple that there are NO loopholes and there is no/little possibility for tax avoidance?

I think the problem is not with the complexity of the tax code, but that those taxed by it have significant incentive to avoid paying taxes, and have the ability to manipulate information such that they can pay less. No matter how you slice it, if government taxes "income", and your business is set up such that you decide what your "income" is, you can control how much tax you are bound to pay. The only way around it…

That is one, but not the only, way around it.

Another is to tax things that are very hard to structure around. Taxing land, taxing stock sales (the SEC section 31 fee), taxing retail purchases, etc.

Re: When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

#174

Post by charlesdm »

dx034 wrote: post #93
zip1234 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax evasion is illegally not paying the taxes that are due. If you are taking advantages of legal loopholes, it is not tax evasion.

With principles based legislation you can introduce rules that make it illegal to find "creative" ways only to circumvent restrictions. These rules already exist for anti money laundering and terrorism financing. The problem is that changes also always affect some of the non-rich. You'll never manage to tailor laws so that everyone is hit exactly as desired.

You can't define "creative ways" in an objective way in a law. It's black or white. What you want is a clear rulebook of what isn't allowed. Everything else is fair game, because that's the only logical way to approach things.

You don't want the IRS dictating what they consider to be creative ways. The IRS can not agree with something you've done, but you don't want to end up in a situation where they effectively make the law. That makes no sense at all.

Re: When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

#175

Post by waisbrot »

sol_remmy wrote: post #141
common_ wrote: post #67

There is only one real tax on the wealthy: a revolution in which all property rights are reset. Everything else is a war between the wealthy themselves to redistribute things in their favor.

And there you sit with probably $50k-100k in assets while the average African has less than one thousand dollars. If you truly wanted the "revolution" to be fair, then all the money would go to third world countries and you'd be left with $3000. But nope, you actually want to be allowed to steal from the rich so you can live an American middle class life without having to work.

The parent post didn't say "and I'll benefit from this". Why can't they have made an honest post -- a truly fair economy would start with most citizens of first-world countries losing everything we've got.

Re: When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

#176

Post by sokoloff »

aaronchall wrote: post #100
jazzyk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you make the rules so simple that there are NO loopholes and there is no/little possibility for tax avoidance?

This would be an ideal world: > What if you make the rules so simple that there are NO loopholes and there is no/little possibility for tax avoidance? Then we could lower tax "rates", reduce dead weight loss, and increase tax receipts. But no, we've decided, for example, that home ownership is important for everyone so we subsidize home ownership by letting people write off mortgage interest. This has the unintended…

Home mortgage interest deduction serves to put the financing of private home ownership on the same footing as financing of commercial house ownership (wherein the interest on loans for income-seeking activities is deductible).

Eliminating the MID without eliminating the deductibility of commercial loans' interest makes commercial purchasing of real estate cheaper than private purchasing. IOW, eliminating the MID is a big handout to commercial landlords and serves to keep even more people renting rather than owning their housing.

Re: When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

#177

Post by brianwawok »

ReverseCold wrote: post #164
brianwawok wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah my hft bot would double stock value of apple for 1 second and a bunch of automatic deaths would be handed down to investors.

I think gp said that it would be taxed at 100%, not that one couldn't keep over x at a time.

Sure we started at 100% tax, and then moved on to death panels for breaking the rule ;)

Re: When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

#178

Post by sokoloff »

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #85
cpursley wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A flat tax rate is not a good idea whatsoever Tell this to the nations which have successfully implemented a flat tax: http://www.economist.com/node/3860731 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_tax#Countries_that_have_f... It's ironic that a number of former Soviet countries have moved on to the flat tax, while the west has a progressive income tax (#2 plank of the Communist Manifesto).

Idk about you but I can't think of many former soviet block countries that have a healthy distribution of wealth between working, middle, and upper classes. Furthermore the list of countries given there are not places where you want to be poor.

What is the list of countries where one would want to be poor?

Re: When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

#179

Post by logfromblammo »

tici_88 wrote: post #10
chollida1 wrote: post #2

I wrote this a few years ago in response to a similar piece: The problem is that the rich have the ability to take their income in alot of different ways. Tax income more, they'll take it as dividends. Tax dividends more, they'll take it as capital gains. Tax capital gains, they won't realize their capital gains until they can offset them with realized losses or they'll just get bank loans again't their stock holding…

"The problem is that no tax code can close all loop holes because you just can't foresee the creative ways people will out maneuver the tax code." I disagree. I simple flat tax rate where everything is taxed at a single rate would close every single one of the loopholes above, if only by making it moot. The fact that the rich can maneuver themselves into a much lower tax rate than the average person presents a signif…

No matter how simple you make the calculation of tax owed, you cannot simplify the complexity of relying on individuals and businesses to report accurate information to feed into the formulas.

You eventually have to define your terms, and those definitions will have the loopholes embedded in them.

That's not to say that simplification is useless. It would still cut a lot of waste out of the costs of collection, enforcement, and compliance.

Re: When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer

#180

Post by topgunsarg »

waisbrot wrote: post #162
harryh wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2016 GE (for example) spent 5.5 billion on R&D. Their CEO Jeffrey Immelt made about 20 million. I don't think a 0.363% increase in the R&D budget would make much of a difference.

So, if I could hire 20 researchers and spend $1m/year each on their salaries and equipment... your guess is that I would accomplish nothing?

If you couldn't have managed that with $5.5Bn then why does an extra $20M help?
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