Surely people recognize that the related article purposely misleads readers by calculating false tax rates based not on income but paper wealth that is not real or recognized. ProPublica has a hard progressive bias, this article being one among many examples.
We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
101–110 of 580 posts
Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of the ultra-wealthy have little or no income. What needs to be taxed is wealth, not income.
I disagree, at least not with so simple an implementation. I don't want to live in a world where we're unable to escape working by constant taxes. There should be at least a minimum threshold where wealth is completely untaxed so that people can live freely and not have to work until they die. Enough for a house, some property and land, and a retirement fund. I'd consider it more justifiable to tax someone like Bill…
Won’t that just increase prices of the things you’ve mentioned?
I feel we should somehow work to become more distributed instead of forcing people to come to large cities because all the opportunity is there
Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
#103It seems like this is missing the obvious focal point: loans taken out by individuals against assets like stock options and equities should be taxed as income. It's trivial to evade income tax when you have accumulated wealth in equities by taking out a loan against the equities and then progressively liquidating them at capital gains tax rates to fulfil the loan payments. If every loan taken out by Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos against their corporate assets were treated as income, I suspect we'd see a much larger share of tax paid by them.
edit: How do I make the same point as u/fairity 5 minutes prior but accumulate down votes? lol
Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
A better analogy would be breaking and entering to collect evidence that a building was unsafe for occupancy, and I’d support that as well under the assumption that due process had failed and there was risk to those marginalized. I don’t believe there is an absolute right to privacy. As always, there’s nuance.
Does this hypothesize the lack of a functioning court system to issue a search warrant, the lack of observing the Fourth Amendment in the US (or equivalent in many other countries), or both?
No hard and fast rules. Like obscenity, a reasonable person believes the situation warrants it when they see it.
Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
#105I would really just like a flat tax. No loopholes or deductions. Very simple. It should not take a masters degree to understand the tax code. I recognize this is one of the main ways Policy is implemented (incentives can drive certain behavior), but we’ve got hundreds of years of complexity going on and I wouldn’t mind simplifying this. I don’t know where to start though.
Economically, you sort of live in a flat tax. ( https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom... ) I know that's not what you mean. But if you simply filed a 1040EZ, then paid a 20% penalty when the IRS sends you a letter saying pay the rest of what you owe, expect to pay... 28 percentage points effective instead of 26. This is to say that tax complexity is a red herring. You can already live in an alm…
Looks like the 1040-EZ is no longer used, could you elaborate on this “hack” you’re suggesting is a flat tax solution?
Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
#106Every time someone tries to make a tax targeting the ultra rich, it ends up hurting the moderately wealthy instead. Every. Single. Time. The worse tax situation is always the person who makes 500k in a good year, or sells a house they held for 25 years which went up a bunch in value. I suspect this is a significant factor in social mobility. Our tax system is punitive to people who try to leave the working class.
You’re not actually talking about the “moderately wealthy.” Just because billionaires are insanely wealthy doesn’t change the fact that a household making $500,000 is still incredibly wealthy.
There’s already an exemption for capital gains tax on the sale of primary homes. $500,000 for married couples, and you can remove the cost basis and cost of improvements from the equation.
In other words, almost nobody is taxed on the sale of their primary home.
A household that makes $500k on a good year is actually in the 1% statistically. They have left the working class long ago. They could work for about 7-10 years in their career and retire with an above-median salary (withdrawing following the 4% rule) in perpetuity. That is by definition not the working class: that family barely has to work in order to secure a lifetime of comfortable living if they don’t inflate their lifestyle.
In my view, your comment acts as an implication of support for regressive tax policy that hurts the actual working class. No, moderately wealthy people do not need help. No, we are not temporarily embarrassed millionaires held back from generational wealthy only by government tax policy – that’s a farce sold to us by the very billionaires that want to avoid being taxed. They want us to think that taxes hurt us more than they hurt them, which is mathematically not true.
They want us to think that “if only our taxes were cut, we could go back to affording a middle class lifestyle.” It’s not true.
Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't pay capital gains taxes until you sell the stock. The IRS only taxes you when you cash out. Presumably the articles will show the wealthy "cashing out" via loopholes that evade the tax.
The trick is to cash out by dying. You can do this by living off loans against your unrealized capital gains. These then get paid off at your death, and there are all kinds of "simple" ways to keep estate untaxed.
I have a friend who is a member of the ultra rich, and this is exactly how his family uses their portfolio. They currently can borrow with .03% interest through their brokerage.
Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of the ultra-wealthy have little or no income. What needs to be taxed is wealth, not income.
A wealth tax will fail for the same reason the income tax has failed. The extremely wealthy will move their wealth into complex multinational financial vehicles and strut up to the tax authority saying, "See? I own very little." It becomes the legislative cat and mouse game, which governments lose when up against those with massive assets with which to lobby. There is not a good answer that I have found to the taxati…
> The extremely wealthy will move their wealth into complex multinational financial vehicles
In Elizabeth Warren's proposal, they would be subject to a 40% exit tax on the wealth that they moved. If they didn't pay the exit tax, that would be fraud.
Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
#109One of the primary mechanisms for tax avoidance is taking out loans against appreciated capital assets to avoid realizing capital gains.
What's stopping the average citizen from exploiting this tax avoidance strategy?
For example, every time I try to submit an order to sell stock that results in short-term capital gains, my broker should be asking me whether I want to take out a collateralized loan instead.
If there are loopholes in the tax system, they should be made readily accessible to all.
Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
But earning couple of times less lol? ) I don't think anyone at all wants live in a place where most people earn a lot less than themselves.
maybe in extremes. like 100:1, but 2:1, 3:1 doesn't seem that bad... honestly better for social cohesion
I can pretty much guarantee that in the semi-rural town where I live, there are households that are probably down around median US income (~$50K) and households making hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.