191–200 of 332 posts
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Can you expand on that please?
SALT is “state and local tax”... you can deduct state and local taxes from your federal taxes, but a few years ago they put a cap on it so you can only deduct $10,000. This really hurt tax payers in higher tax states.
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So what would be a single reason for person with $100MM of wealth to give $25MM away to wasteful, corruptive government? What kind of benefits the person is gaining by buying $25MM worth of taxes? I thought so too. Give that person a chance to reinvest these money into local economy, growing productive businesses instead of slapping the "filthy rich" label and suddenly there is a lots of capital are used for everyone…
They are contributing to the long term stability and prosperity of the society that provided the very environment that enabled them establish their wealth in the first place. Pay it forward as it were. Unfortunately many people don't appear to think like that. Or are willfully blind/ ignorant. Take your pick.
A bit of simple math is needed to supplement decisions in terms of return on investment.
Overbloated government spending and useless wars are not a good arguments either.
If government cannot manage their budgets well, why would people who can manage their budgets better should listen?
That's why i'm against high taxes. We get a bunch of random political parties, promising to "tax the rich" and stuff, we get new laws... and what happens? - The poor already pay very little tax - no change there - The rich avoid the tax by doing shady stuff (who remembers the panama papers.. or this.. or many other stories like these) - I, the middle class engineer get fucked by the taxes, and I get fucked hard, and…
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More than 1% of US households (something like 1.5M households with a total of ~3M people) have >$10M in household net worth. The primary target is that class, irrespective of its members’ earned income, in part because they can reliably earn mid-six-figures per year in returns to capital alone. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/10/22/the-number...
Great, but there are many more mid-six-figure earners who don't have >$10M in household net worth. And if you tax mid-six-figure earners, you get them, too. If you want to target wealth over $10M, tax wealth over $10M .
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But the conversation is always towards higher taxes rather than fixing enforcement, design, etc. Edit: I think I hit a nerve.
Not really. The Biden administration’s proposals include more funding and organisational reform for the IRS. Democrats have been talking for some time about how the steady defunding of the IRS has resulted in less tax collection from the rich and powerful.
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Why do you want access to other people's riches?
Why does one person need $1bn? If we can ensure that no single individual has to live below the poverty line then I'm less worried about individuals who attain huge stores of wealth.
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Middle class engineers make 7 figure salaries?
No, that’s the top 0.35% Where does the middle class top off? $125,000/year individual income puts you in top 10%. Pretty normal for a software engineer. Is that middle class?
Depends on the location and cost of living?
And no I'm not saying you should just offset income by exactly the CoL. Obviously being in a prime location has its own benefits too. But you can't just assume the benefits cancel the extra cost of living either; they certainly don't cancel for everybody. The balance is somewhere in between. (I don't have a formula.)
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Being a software engineer in a EU country, you're definitely not a classically rich person. In USA, maybe? In EU not so much. There's so many professions (quite common at that) that earn more, or even much more than us.
Why aren’t software engineers valued more in EU?
If you want to make more money you become a manager. Developers are just like electricians or brick layers.
They also don’t have the FAANG to create tons of value from software.
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> I, the middle class engineer get fucked by the taxes Fwiw we feel like middle class but we’re really in the top 5% or higher. We’re the rich people these taxes and politicians talk about. The ultra rich/wealthy are a red herring, there’s only a few 10k of them of them. Only 614 people are billionaires. 7 figure income (salary) puts you in top 0.35% ... that’s 1,120,000 Americans. Not a whole lot. edit: top 10% star…
No, no, earning a salary is for poor people. Real rich people own things. They also happen to own most of the things .