111–120 of 580 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You obviously haven't been to Finland. In Scandinavia, the approach to other person earning couple of times more than you could be summarized by "good for you".
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.
One 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…
https://www.schwab.com/pledged-asset-line https://www.wealthfront.com/portfolio-line-of-credit
And HELOCs are essentially the same for people who own a house but not stocks.
One 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…
Probably that the average citizen doesn't have capital gains.
What I don't understand is: If I (a wage slave) find a football sized diamond in my back yard, I'm suddenly very "wealthy". Should I be forced to pay taxes on that find because my wealth has increased? What if I want to keep that diamond but cannot afford to because of the taxes? Isn't that how business owners gain wealth: By the valuation defined by others to the thing they "found". Should we force Bezos et al to se…
This is a strawman argument. Bezos did not stumble across Amazon while digging weeds in his back garden. He built a successful business through a mixture of hard work, risk, his contacts, laws and infrastructure that we collectively paid for. It’s not downplaying his efforts to point out that he now contributes proportionally less to the country than he benefits from. This isn’t an accident, either. Bezos pays smart…
What I'm asking is: Please clarify whether the intent is to tax people based on their net worth (wealth), not their income.
The articles are not clear. They state that capital gains are lower than income taxes, but they are not 1%. Yet they state that Bezos paid less than 1% effective tax rate on his wealth increases. Implying that it's obvious we should have taxed that. It's not obvious. Presumably, and I'm asking for clarification here, he would eventually be taxed on that wealth when he liquidates it.
If so, forcing someone to liquidate by placing a high tax burden on them is unprecedented for stock holdings and other forms of wealth, but not unprecedented for, say, land valuations.
One 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…
You can: https://www.schwab.com/pledged-asset-line https://www.wealthfront.com/portfolio-line-of-credit And HELOCs are essentially the same for people who own a house but not stocks.
The debtor avoids the elevated short-term capital gains tax.
The bank gets interest payments on a loan that has an almost 0 default rate due to the loan being fully collateralized.
What I don't understand is: If I (a wage slave) find a football sized diamond in my back yard, I'm suddenly very "wealthy". Should I be forced to pay taxes on that find because my wealth has increased? What if I want to keep that diamond but cannot afford to because of the taxes? Isn't that how business owners gain wealth: By the valuation defined by others to the thing they "found". Should we force Bezos et al to se…
> What if I want to keep that diamond but cannot afford to because of the taxes? Then you have to sell it. This is no different from game show awards, where the “car” you ein is taxed at the car’s value, so unless you have enough savings, you have to sell the car to pay the taxes. I don’t really see any problem with this though? Absolutely we should force Bezos to sell some of his stock to pay taxes: employees alread…
Or is that not the claim being made here? Isn't that the vast majority of the richests' wealth?
One 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…
If you’re gonna say “they benefit in the extra capital gains between now and when the loan is repaid” - no, that can’t be it, that’s exactly equivalent to taking a $100 loan and investing in stocks instead (i.e. leverage).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm sure there's some rich people / families living in otherwise underwhelming houses, but they're generally a minority. There are more than you think. Pretty much every city has a nice neighborhood where the wealthy residents live. The difference between someone worth $10mm vs someone worth $100mm is not visible from the street.
Does that difference matter when kidnapping? Its not like the 100mm person has more money readily available, as they'll likely both have the bulk invested/tied up in some way. You can only get their fluid money which is probably quite similar in a time sensitive situation like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Every 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.