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tldr: there is no such thing as "before tax income" as all income is only able to be earned because services paid for by taxes are satisfied necessary preconditions. Tying tax owed to services rendered calls for a change in the code to properly get to Elon's fair share.
Edit: Calm down, downvoters - its not a defense of billionaires. Quite the opposite.
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I agree that taxing unrealized capital gains is a fundamentally flawed approach. However, the problem with the current system is that these ultra-wealthy people just end up borrowing against their equity, avoiding selling if possible. I think it would make sense to count borrowing against equity as tax-wise equivalent to selling that same equity. With that loophole closed, together with raising the capital gains tax,…
But borrowing is not equivalent to selling, tax wise or any otherwise. When you get a mortgage to buy a $750k house, do you want to be taxed as though you had $750k income that year? You’re just borrowing against the value of an asset after all.
I've seen people complaining that the article is disingenuous because it conflates income taxes with capital gains taxes. My response is 'so what'. When you make above a certain income level, you don't need anymore income and can play around with reinvesting capital gains to push taxes into the future while amassing wealth. Sure, you're not realizing the income, but what you're doing, I think, is gaining power and in…
It’s hard to value a potential large liquidation. A market sell by Jeff Bezos of 40% of his Amazon stock to pay for income tax would destabilize the markets. Also, if there was no tax advantage to holding stocks long term, the entire stock market would have been liquidated to zero in q1 of 2020. market volatility would certainly be much higher than it is now.
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I am confused. They were clearly discussing unrealized gains as wealth throughout the article. What am I missing here?
Look at this sentence in the Propublica article: > No one among the 25 wealthiest avoided as much tax as Buffett, the grandfatherly centibillionaire. That’s perhaps surprising, given his public stance as an advocate of higher taxes for the rich. It is clickbait, emotion inducing garbage. Buffett’s stance for higher taxes has nothing to do with the fact that he had less income than other rich people. I expected better…
"Don't hate the player hate the game," is what comes to my mind. I would guess it's all legal. It is still good to have transparency, which might potentially change things. I am not so sure though. After all, politicans are usually rich as well. But: All of these super-rich have probably created many, many jobs. I guess all-in-all it is a positive game for society.
At a certain level of wealth, you are the game. Amazon’s famous HQ2 contest was literally about which city would bend its own tax laws to benefit them most.
The referred ProPublica article has a lot more details: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
It's bizarre to see the federal outcry here since in Norway, everyone's tax return is "public". (You can request to see anybody's but they do get a notification that you viewed it. It was anonymous until recently) It's hard to argue against sunlight being the best disinfectant.
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> I would guess it's all legal. When it's all secret, we can't make an informed decision on whether or not it should be legal.
Publicly release your own tax return first then. Be the change you want to see.
What bit of information do you expect that tax return add to the conversation of "Are the rich evading taxes?"
I've seen people complaining that the article is disingenuous because it conflates income taxes with capital gains taxes. My response is 'so what'. When you make above a certain income level, you don't need anymore income and can play around with reinvesting capital gains to push taxes into the future while amassing wealth. Sure, you're not realizing the income, but what you're doing, I think, is gaining power and in…
We do tax capital gains. You pay taxes when you sell. Do you mean tax unrealized capital gains? There is a reason you don’t owe taxes on a stock you haven’t sold yet. For one thing, what if you have to pay tax at one valuation, and then it goes down later.
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> I would guess it's all legal. When it's all secret, we can't make an informed decision on whether or not it should be legal.
What's secret? Income and capital gains brackets are public knowledge. Is who has the money really that important? If you think income over 100,000 should be taxed higher, you can already use the current brackets as reference(and compare to what other countries use, for example).