You Are Jeff Bezos

I decided to "pay off personal taxes"

>Here's where we get into the dicey business of what "personal worth" is, and how that translates to taxable income.

>Answer: It usually doesn't, because rich people are master frauds and charlatans who exploit loopholes in tax code to avoid paying their fair share.

>Jeff Bezos is worth $156 billion? You're using the top tax bracket of 37% and paying out $57.72 billion of that. You'd pay 99%, but then this would be a very short simulator.

That's not how it really works, right? He's supposed to pay tax on income not on wealth.

This appears to either be a sincere product of a socialist Utopian who doesn't understand basic physical processes and tax concepts, or a cleaver work of satire. I'm unsure which at this time.

> He's supposed to pay tax on income not on wealth.

Yes. That’s the trap most of these arguments for taxing the rich fall into under the current system. Having money and making money are taxed differently.

If you own a house and all of your neighbors sell theirs at a 30% markup, should you pay taxes on making $300,000 (for a 1mil house) this year? Maybe … seems kinda unfair though. You didn’t participate in those transactions and made no money to pay the new taxes with.

Should wealth be capped? Dunno, maybe. It would solve a lot of problems and yet feels a bit draconian.

Should wealth be repatriated by the state? Eh no let’s not go there. Large swathes of Europe tried that in the past and it’s still causing problems.

Should “rich people” be taxed? Yeah definitely. The hard part is defining what exactly gets taxed and how. Making people sell their assets to pay taxes on those assets seems kinda weird to me.

This is just another piece written by someone who does not understand how income tax works and is unable to appreciate that this problem is actually complicated.

If Jeff Bezos net worth increases by 1 billion over a year, he hasn't realized any of the actual gains and that profit it purely on paper. If he chose to live on 1M$/year then he only has to pay 370k$ in taxes that's how it works for you and me and that's how it works for him.

Does it make sense that he paid 0$ in taxes and bought a 300M$ yacht? Absolutely not and we should find ways to close that loophole. Does it mean that we should tax wealth? Absolutely not.

The major complication is the politics though, the fact that building housing is so hard isn't for lack of money, it's all politics and Bezos' $20B won't be able to solve that.