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How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

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Re: How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

#121

Post by CraigJPerry »

doovd wrote: post #80
dmje wrote: post #68

Unfashionable thought: pay your damn taxes. Loopholes are one thing and IMO should be closed but morality is another. The whole idea that you can make a billion dollar business without being hugely dependent on the infrastructure, education, history, societal background etc that has largely been paid for by...taxes...is utter fallacy. Maybe if massively profitable businesses spent a bit more time doing the right thin…

businesses yes. But governments abuse public spending - at least in the UK a significant chunk gets funnelled to conservative friends and family...why should I therefore want to fund that?

Why would a desire to pay less tax on your part influence a government’s misappropriation of the public purse?

That’s what voting is for surely?

Re: How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

#122

Post by mellavora »

dmje wrote: post #68

Unfashionable thought: pay your damn taxes. Loopholes are one thing and IMO should be closed but morality is another. The whole idea that you can make a billion dollar business without being hugely dependent on the infrastructure, education, history, societal background etc that has largely been paid for by...taxes...is utter fallacy. Maybe if massively profitable businesses spent a bit more time doing the right thin…

My brother's life was paid for by taxes. Went to the ER with a headache, turned out to be a brain annurism leading to 2 8rh plus surgeries and a month in the hospital. Bill was paid out of Minnesota state taxpayers fund. Otherwise he would have been bankrupt for life -- and without the surgery that life would not have been long.

My wife's life was saved twice by tax-funded health care. Won't share details here.

I happen to enjoy quite a few government services. Like "roads".

I'm happy to pay taxes.

I don't always like the way they are spent. I also don't like everything about my job, and if I had a dog I could probably find things about it that I didn't like.

Life is compromise.

Re: How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

#123

Post by mschuster91 »

tlb wrote: post #76
jen729w wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say that this article should be titled “how to steal from society”, so I’ll join you in downvote-city, comrade.

"How to take money from society whose elected representative set up a specific program to hand out" Which I also refuse to take, myself, but for different reasons than refusing to steal.

Intent matters. Opportunity Zones are set up to incentivize actual businesses providing services to the local community, not to serve as vehicles for far-away rich arseholes to cheat money out of the taxman.

Re: How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

#124

Post by popcorncowboy »

TrackerFF wrote: post #111
dmje wrote: post #68

Unfashionable thought: pay your damn taxes. Loopholes are one thing and IMO should be closed but morality is another. The whole idea that you can make a billion dollar business without being hugely dependent on the infrastructure, education, history, societal background etc that has largely been paid for by...taxes...is utter fallacy. Maybe if massively profitable businesses spent a bit more time doing the right thin…

Honest to god, I'm kind of stunned by the people with tens to HUNDREDS of millions, liquid, that will go great lengths to avoid, even evade, taxes. You see people move to other countries for "tax purposes" alone. Or people that will create elaborate schemes. Of course, I understand that if you're in that wealth bracket, the actual tax/accounting acrobatics is abstracted from you. You probably hire some consultant to…

> what's the difference between sitting on say $500MM in cash, and $800MM?

At least $15M a year over most 3 year horizons, or the insane compounding effect of $300M invested over the long haul. Your question makes sense from a "normal" perspective, but doesn't once you're UHNW [0].

> It's either way going to be more money than you'll ever be able to spend.

Not even close. At UHNW levels there are whole classes of things to "spend" on that ramp pretty quickly into 8, 9, 10+ figure values. Influence, power, status, prestige, legacy, ideology, politics, rinse, repeat. And the UHNW "brackets" are a real thing (you're either in the tres commas club or you're not, etc).

Sure, pay your taxes. But once you crack these numbers there are entire industries dedicated to helping you work the system, and it's unfortunately pretty workable (because there are substantial interests lobbying to make/keep it so).

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_high-net-worth_individua...

Re: How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

#125

Post by 0xy »

jusssi wrote: post #57
0xy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capital gains tax is a parasitical tax that punishes people for being responsible with their after-tax money. It also creates massive, massive loopholes that can be abused. The fairest solution is to scrap CGT and associated capital loss write-offs. This allows the middle class to thrive by investing in productive enterprises and not getting taxed yet again to do so. It's the worst kind of tax that punishes success b…

There are two groups slicing the worker's cheese. One is the state, they claim tax. The other is the investors, they claim profit. Calling out other parasites, don't forget you also are one.

This can only be true if you hold humans in such low regard that you think they cannot make an informed choice about where to work and under which conditions.

Any example of a cooperative usually descends into chaos, an example being worker's unions which descend into criminality, corruption and pure evil (teacher's unions regularly defend sexual predator teachers, for example) more often than not.

It's also a pure fallacy and just plain wrong to suggest I claim profit from Cloudflare. Cloudflare has not and does not issue dividends, meaning all of the profit is reinvested in business operations or goes to the workers.

As an investor, I don't see a single cent of profit in this case.

Re: How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

#126

Post by [deleted] »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #121
doovd wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

businesses yes. But governments abuse public spending - at least in the UK a significant chunk gets funnelled to conservative friends and family...why should I therefore want to fund that?

Why would a desire to pay less tax on your part influence a government’s misappropriation of the public purse? That’s what voting is for surely?

[deleted]

Re: How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

#127

Post by Thorrez »

panta wrote: post #113
bojangleslover wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. The top 1% pay 33% of the tax (and the top 10%, "upper middle class", pay 70%). I think myth just causes confusion and misplaced anger.

Yes, but these stats obviously take into account only paid taxes and wealth that remains visible. If you have 50 bn$, of which 1 is kept and taxed locally, and 49 moved through shell companies to offshore tax heavens, you'll still end up as one of the top tax payers, even if you are evading about ~5000%. Obviously this is much harder to do if you earn 200k/year.

Yes, if the top 1% paid their fair share, they would pay more than 33% of the country's taxes. But nevertheless they do in fact pay 33% of the country's taxes.

Re: How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

#128

Post by cassepipe »

doovd wrote: post #80
dmje wrote: post #68

Unfashionable thought: pay your damn taxes. Loopholes are one thing and IMO should be closed but morality is another. The whole idea that you can make a billion dollar business without being hugely dependent on the infrastructure, education, history, societal background etc that has largely been paid for by...taxes...is utter fallacy. Maybe if massively profitable businesses spent a bit more time doing the right thin…

businesses yes. But governments abuse public spending - at least in the UK a significant chunk gets funnelled to conservative friends and family...why should I therefore want to fund that?

Seems like you need and try to convince people around you to vote for a party that wants high taxes on the rich (that include wealthy politicians), transparency on public expenses, public data on politicians resources, democratic control/revocation of elected representatives/public servants ? And forbid money owned medias by controlling their finances too ? There are only two ways to take down an oligarchy, a revolution and its unavoidable oligarchic backlash with the help of antidemocratic violent forces or use of the Democratic tools that the oligarchy had to concede throughout the accidents of history to divide it further and reinforce democracy. You will find it is quite hard though.

Re: How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

#129

Post by Aeolun »

whitepaint wrote: post #102
dmje wrote: post #68

Unfashionable thought: pay your damn taxes. Loopholes are one thing and IMO should be closed but morality is another. The whole idea that you can make a billion dollar business without being hugely dependent on the infrastructure, education, history, societal background etc that has largely been paid for by...taxes...is utter fallacy. Maybe if massively profitable businesses spent a bit more time doing the right thin…

You want to tell me when you do your taxes with your accountant you don't try to pay as little taxes as legally possible?

Mostly I just apply the straightforward rules until it seems fair. I don’t go making a seperate company to invest in a different company to hire workers in a specific area so that I can later pay zero taxes on capital gains.

Honestly, the level of bother is too much to keep track of for 20%, which is already really low.

Re: How to have a billion dollar exit with zero capital gains tax

#130

Post by ben-schaaf »

seibelj wrote: post #91
diob wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism these days feels akin to joining a game of monopoly where everything has already been purchased. But feel free to have a jolly time going around the board and paying rent :)

At least in capitalism you can start a new business. The folly of the Monopoly board game is the limited spaces which makes things a zero-sum game. The world is only zero-sum when the government doesn’t let you build new stuff through artificial constraints. In a free market always get new stuff.

I can't think of a single thing that isn't inherently limited. Maybe the sun is practically infinite, though you're certainly limited by the amount of power you can capture. Land, natural resources, time, it all has limits.
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