The existence of stuff like this is why I'm always so skeptical of "fix everything" plans such as what Harris apparently recently said about taxing unrealized gains. I heard it secondhand but it appears that whopper of a tax is 'only' for those with income or assets or something over X hundred million dollars. Guess what though? The venn diagram of those folks, and people who can afford attorneys to evade such a tax by methods such as described here, is a circle. And when that scheme brings in far too little money, I assume it'll be expanded downward till it actually hits those of us who are just trying to get to retirement and may or may not make it.
Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
321–330 of 504 posts
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
> otherwise it will just gradually get worse. The austerity policies of the neoliberal turn has already caused standards of living among the less fortunate to drop over the last few decades already. The 2008 crisis is when it started to impact the middle class and we're still feeling the impacts 16+ years later.
There has been no austerity: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
Austerity for thee, but not for me.
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#323Earlier 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?
> Most people try to minimize taxes No, most people don't care about their tax the way wealthy people do. I ended up in a wealthy family through marriage and I can tell you nobody I my original social circle spent even a fraction of the effort the wealthy do when it comes to taxes.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps that could be part of why they are in fact wealthy?
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The rule of Bureaucracy: grow to absorb all available resources
Ah yes, Parkinson's Law.
(defun parkinsons-law (k m p n)
(/ (+ (* 2 (expt k m))
p)
n))
Where:
The retval is the number of new employees to be hired annually
k is the number of employees who want to be promoted by hiring new employees
m is the number of working hours per person for the preparation of internal memoranda (micropolitics)
p is the difference between the age at hiring and the age at retirement
n is the number of administrative files actually completedRe: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#325So the thing does not work except if they know a friend who knows a friend who can pull some strings to get them an ultra low interest rate loan.
But I try to understand why one would give me a loan at loss for them, unless they expect a favor in return
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point in my life I took a step back to look at my life and how I’m doing and how much I pay for that life. Maybe I’m just incredibly lucky. My conservative expectation is that we all have to start contributing a lot more over the next few decades if we want to maintain our standard of living, otherwise it will just gradually get worse. I hope I’m wrong.
> otherwise it will just gradually get worse. The austerity policies of the neoliberal turn has already caused standards of living among the less fortunate to drop over the last few decades already. The 2008 crisis is when it started to impact the middle class and we're still feeling the impacts 16+ years later.
Do you really think the explosion in government spending is the result of austerity?
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it puzzling to avoid taxes? This is the rational thing to in terms of maximizing one's utility.
Only if the government provides you (and society) no services.
Even assuming a perfectly efficient government with good intentions, you should not expect to benefit from more than a fraction of your tax money if you are above median income.
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#328Earlier 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 who acquire money simply reset the goalposts.
ESPN recently did a movie on what happened to poor people who suddenly became multi-millionaires when they joined a pro sports team.
TLDR: they quickly spent it all and wound up with nothing. It turns out to be amazingly easy to burn through a million dollars.
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It might be they’re just against taxes. How could that be a surprising thing to you?
In democracies, the massive bulk of people are voting to steal the money of the rich. That’s not cool.