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For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

nytimes.com

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Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#251

Post by ComputerGuru »

ptero wrote: post #244
ComputerGuru wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a lot easier on your sanity to just accept that (insanely) crazy coincidences happen. If it helps, that number jumped to 6.5T a few years later and now stands at 21T and the military and Pentagon have simply stalled all attempts at enforcing audits. They have the gall to simply refuse to account for the discrepancies and believe they cannot be taken to task for misappropriated funds; they don’t need to blow up r…

I do not doubt that the waste and accountability are a huge problem in the DoD, but $21T sounds extreme. The FY19 total military budget, according to Wikipedia, is a bit under $700B and you need to misappropriate 30 years of that to embezzle $21T. And that assumes everything is misappropriated (no salaries, no fuel to fly planes, etc.) and does not account for growth (30 years ago the budget was a lot smaller than it…

It’s not really $21T in cash but rather $21T worth of book-cooking “adjustments” to make the numbers align. This article gives a good overview: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/us/politics/fact-check-pe...

The NYT article claims that’s the absolute value of cooked assets and liabilities rather than the net amount but in truth it’s misappropriation so many levels deep (and recursive in parts) that you can’t even tell whether dollars are being made or lost. Purposely, I can only presume.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#252

Post by ur-whale »

Correction: the rich pay a lower tax rate than you.

They do pay, however, vastly more than you do.

The various governments have somehow managed to brainwash the masses into comparing rates instead of actual amount paid.

Very neat trick of you ask me.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#254

Post by scarejunba »

greggman2 wrote: post #112
gnicholas wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deductions abound that have since been eliminated. Yep, and those "deductions" are now referred to as "tax shelters" (post-1986). Basically, high-earners could invest a relatively small amount of capital into a "business" that was certain to generate large tax losses. These were things like llama farms or avocado farms. The entire purpose was to generate deductions, since the capital invested was smaller than the t…

> since the capital invested was smaller than the tax losses generate Can you give an example of how that works? As a non-rich person if I invest $100 it seems like the largest taxes I can pay is $100 (100% tax). How do I generate > $100 tax loss for a $100 investment?

Once upon a time there were laws that said that if you had expenses on certain farms you could deduct those from your income (and sometimes carry those expenses over to later). There was no true economic loss. You still had the farm. It's just that expenses counted as deductible.

This was for the reason that farms sometimes have a large lead time before they're productive and I want to give you the chance of surviving the first few years that weren't productive.

I think this was notorious as a citrus and almond farm thing.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#255

Post by dr_dshiv »

>The overall tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was only 23 percent, meaning that their combined tax payments equaled less than one quarter of their total income. This overall rate was 70 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980.

I thought those rates referred to income made above different cut offs, not the overall amount of money made...

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#256

Post by Pywarrior »

Do they mean a lower tax rate or total dollars? I'd like to talk about total dollars not percentages, percentages are misleading. If someone is paying 1 million in taxes and you pay 10 thousand, they pay more than you, regardless of conversion to percentages of taxable income.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#257

Post by ur-whale »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #28
partingshots wrote: post #22

So since this is all 100% legal, are there resources available for people like us in the upper middle class bracket working as engineers in Silicon Valley to take advantage of all this? Almost half of my salary goes to taxes every paycheck. That’s almost $150,000 I literally never get to see just taken away.

You do see it though. In your roads, your public libraries, educated working-class, your parks, your clean air, your safe-to-drink milk, etc etc etc

You mostly see how much of it is squandered away by incompetent and/or corrupt bureaucrats.

I'd love to pay more taxes if the actual so-called "social contract" wasn't something in between a heist and an absolute management mess.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#258

Post by 5trokerac3 »

chagen wrote: post #233
5trokerac3 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. US population: 329,663,350 2. 0.01% is 32,966 people, not 100 3. There are 585 billionaires in the US [0] 4. Billionaires make up 0.00017% of the population [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_numbe...

regarding 2: I think they meant millionaires with more than $100,000,000.

> 100 millionaires and billionaires.

There are over 500 billionaires. My point being that OP's point comes off as an emotional argument as opposed to a data-based one.

Edit: I now understand the OP meant "100-millionairs". Even so, the math is still off. As of 2015 there were ~5000 100-millionaires and billionaires in the US[1]. That's 0.0015% of the population.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2015/06/15/5000-u-...

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#259

Post by zarro »

I think this “vilify the rich minority” mentality that’s so popular these days is destructive in the fact that the people that popularize this, see it as a path of least resistance to getting subsidized at the expense of the rich, instead of working toward improving themselves and the value of the products/services they provide so that they may, in return, purchase valuable services for themselves.

In the end when this sort of mentality is allowed to win out, what it leads to is the dissolution of those valuable services these “rich” people provide which made them their wealth in the first place. It’s unfortunate that only AFTER their dissolution, the original proponents of this mentality are the ones that suffer and realize their short sightedness.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#260

Post by gnicholas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #232
gnicholas wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree that we should inflation-index assets for which electronic purchase/sale records readily available (stock purchased through brokerages). For other types of assets, the inflation rationale is still a decent reason to have a lower LTCG rate (think antiques, paintings, etc.).

> I completely agree that we should inflation-index assets for which electronic purchase/sale records readily available (stock purchased through brokerages). How are electronic records relevant? The information needed is expected, whether records or electronic or not, when doing capital gains now, so there's non rational need for electronic records. > For other types of assets, the inflation rationale is still a dece…

How do you prove how long you've held an asset, so the appropriate inflation adjustment can be done?
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