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Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

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Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#311

Post by sandspar »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #297
SoftTalker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this puzzle you? It seems like completely expected behavior to me. Most people try to minimize taxes. Who do you know that gladly pays more than they legally have to pay?

Guess it's easy to talk this way as someone who isn't that rich, but if I'm at the point where I have 8 figures accessible, or 7 figures liquid and own all the important assets (house, car, kids' college funds in 523, etc), I don't particularly care what part of my income is being taxed past that point. My goal isn't to make money for money's sake. Nor even leaving oodles of money to my kids. I'd metaphorically just…

People always talk like this from the outside and yet when placed in the actual situation essentially everyone acts differently. "If I were in battle I wouldn't be scared" vs in actual battle essentially every soldier is scared. "If I were rich then I wouldn't worry about taxes" vs after becoming rich, essentially everyone worries about taxes.

Is there a word for this phenomenon? What makes everyone believe they're a special case?

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#312

Post by card_zero »

vineyardmike wrote: post #296
zb1plus wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things. I would be much happier to pay taxes if they went to funding schools, infrastructure, NASA, emergency management, poverty relief and other useful things instead of…

> I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things. Obviously, this was supposed to be the job of the person you elected. But in 2024 we definitely have the technology to let people vote on smaller units of issues…

The caps must be high enough that departments are in competition for funds. Presumably the outcome is then that the department for fluffy bunnies is funded up to its cap, taking money away from the department for unblocking drains.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#313

Post by adastra22 »

ta_1138 wrote: post #259
TrackerFF wrote: post #85

It always puzzled me how tax-adverse some wealthy people are. I'm not talking about the wealthy people that have 100% of their wealth tied up to company (stock) that they operate - but the wealthy people that are just asset-rich, with zero operational duties. Their wealth is handled by wealth managers, they probably don't even know what they own. But minimizing taxes and hoarding wealth is priority number 1.

Why do you think that minimizing taxes becomes their #1 priority? What actually happens is that they tell the guy handling your finances to save them some money, and that's their problem. And given their fee structure, they'll go as far as they need to, even though the rich person in question doesn't really think about their taxes all that much. This is the real multiplicative effect of being really rich: It's not kn…

Nah I’ve met a fair number of mega-high wealth individuals. They would go so far as to pick a materially worse deal that allowed them to pay no taxes, over a higher payout that required some taxes paid. It is nuts.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#314

Post by johnnyanmac »

sandspar wrote: post #311
johnnyanmac wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess it's easy to talk this way as someone who isn't that rich, but if I'm at the point where I have 8 figures accessible, or 7 figures liquid and own all the important assets (house, car, kids' college funds in 523, etc), I don't particularly care what part of my income is being taxed past that point. My goal isn't to make money for money's sake. Nor even leaving oodles of money to my kids. I'd metaphorically just…

People always talk like this from the outside and yet when placed in the actual situation essentially everyone acts differently. "If I were in battle I wouldn't be scared" vs in actual battle essentially every soldier is scared. "If I were rich then I wouldn't worry about taxes" vs after becoming rich, essentially everyone worries about taxes. Is there a word for this phenomenon? What makes everyone believe they're a…

Yeah, probably. That's why I left a footnote.

I have some "relative" taste of it in that I'm a lot better off than the past 3 generations of my family minimum. But I was still far from what I consider "wealthy" even within the tech community, let alone to the country at large. I didn't feel it fundamentally changed how I approached finances outside of being more willing to splurge on some tech (something I've always wanted to do) after I put away 20% for savings.

But that's only one magnitude. Who knows, money corrupts for a reason.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#315

Post by wtetzner »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #193
SoftTalker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this puzzle you? It seems like completely expected behavior to me. Most people try to minimize taxes. Who do you know that gladly pays more than they legally have to pay?

> Who do you know that gladly pays more than they legally have to pay? What paying more in taxes gets more done in the things paid by taxes. It's like there is a direct dependency between a money received from the taxes and the things made/built on the tax money.

I don't know if that's really true. The government tends to be inefficient, and I sometimes wonder if having more tax money available just allows them to be even more inefficient.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#316

Post by tqi »

yccs27 wrote: post #100
pmichaud wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's just no good solution here, but I think the original inspiration for this sort of law was about family homes. It's one thing to inherit stocks and have to sell some of them off, but it's much more complex to try to pass down a property that can't be arbitrarily subdivided. There are various options obviously, but I think enough people had to sell their beloved childhood home because of the tax obligatio…

Isn‘t this a false dichotomy? Removing the cost basis step-up doesn‘t automatically mean any taxes are due on the inheitance - you could just keep the low cost basis and pay the tax once you actually realize your gains.

Don't you need money to pay the estate tax?

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#317

Post by justahuman74 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #270
smsm42 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an average person, there's not. Like, if I pay twice as much taxes as I do now, literally nothing would change in anything paid by taxes, and I have no ways to effect that change. Same if by some miracle I stopped paying all federal taxes, there's literally nothing that would change in federal government's actions or budgets.

If everyone thought this way the government would be bankrupt.

or $35T due.

"Bankrupt" doesn't makes sense as a concept when when you can print the currency of your debt

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#318

Post by metabagel »

Symmetry wrote: post #176

Rather than the normal solutions, it would be really nice to just move to a progressive consumption tax. 1) All investments are tax deductible, not just 401Ks. 2) The sale of investments is treated as income. 3) Money from loans is also taxed as income, unless used for (1).

Investments aren’t taxed until capital gains are realized or income received via dividends. The point of 401Ks is to enable investing income which has not been taxed. So, I don’t understand your proposal.

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#319

Post by archagon »

sandspar wrote: post #311
johnnyanmac wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess it's easy to talk this way as someone who isn't that rich, but if I'm at the point where I have 8 figures accessible, or 7 figures liquid and own all the important assets (house, car, kids' college funds in 523, etc), I don't particularly care what part of my income is being taxed past that point. My goal isn't to make money for money's sake. Nor even leaving oodles of money to my kids. I'd metaphorically just…

People always talk like this from the outside and yet when placed in the actual situation essentially everyone acts differently. "If I were in battle I wouldn't be scared" vs in actual battle essentially every soldier is scared. "If I were rich then I wouldn't worry about taxes" vs after becoming rich, essentially everyone worries about taxes. Is there a word for this phenomenon? What makes everyone believe they're a…

What makes you believe that “after becoming rich, essentially everyone worries about taxes”?

Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained

#320

Post by [deleted] »

gen220 wrote: post #246
brigadier132 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning productive assets is a tortured use of the word hoarding. edit: Hoarding is buying assets that could be used productively and storing them somewhere instead of using them. People with a political axe to grind like taking words with negative connotations and applying them to things that don't make sense to manipulate you. If you think about it for more than two seconds you will understand we already have a word…

I’ll bite. Of every dollar you contributed to your 401k last paycheck, how many cents of them do you think you’ll actually spend in retirement, on a risk-adjusted basis? For me, the answer is certainly not 100 and not 0, let’s say it’s 80 cents. Speaking for myself, I think that marginal 20 cents is by definition hoarding because the marginal utility of money to me at that point is negligible. Sure it could benefit m…

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