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Who died and left the US $7B?

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Re: Who died and left the US $7B?

#321

Post by arcticbull »

lazide wrote: post #252
arcticbull wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you answer my question about itemized vs unitemized sales taxes in the US vs UK and whether you think it relevant?

Of course it’s relevant to the business models, specific prices charged, marketing, and general economics. In a way that means the details matter and you’ll get different end prices, even for the same nominal tax rate, depending on how it is applied. For instance, when sales taxes are not shown at point of choice (on the shelves) they tend to not impact consumer behavior (US), where when they are (most of Europe), th…

My question was about whether an itemized receipt changes who pays

Re: Who died and left the US $7B?

#322

Post by monocasa »

opo wrote: post #191
_bin_ wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something people love to rage about, yet it's not one with an obvious fix. The counterpoint is that this leaves money invested, which means others invest in other things, and still entails interest payments. It exists in part because you don't want someone who inherited his parents' house and wants to move in to go broke trying to pay taxes, or have to re-mortgage it, with an even stronger case with family fa…

>This is something people love to rage about ... Yes, people get angry about this, but no one has provided any statistics showing this is actually a common loophole. The basic idea in the reddit post is that there were lenders giving multi-decade loans at a tiny interest rate (only payable upon death with also sharing a % share of the gains). Maybe there are lenders who have lots of capital and also don't understand…

The banks don't like to dump multiple billions at once into these schemes. It's more about trickling hundreds of millions a year out to cover all possible living expenses, and a lot of that going into assets like houses and ships that can get repoed if shit hits the fan.

He wanted $13B liquid to start Blue Origin, a pretty speculative venture that might end up with nothing. And wanted to still outright own Blue Origin unlike Musk's Twitter buy that was highly leveraged by the Saudis.

Re: Who died and left the US $7B?

#323

Post by arcticbull »

bluGill wrote: post #293
jjav wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Renters do not pay property tax in the US. There's a simple way to visualize why is not true: You're renting a property for $1000/mo. Whatever the owner is paying for property taxes, you don't know. Then, property taxes go up by $200/mo. Do you think your rent won't go up by at least $200/mo as a direct consequence of the tax increase? Because it will. Because the renter is of course paying for all costs, including…

Rent does not go up because your landlord has to compete with a landlord one town over where the tax didn't go up and so if your rent goes up you will just move.

That requires getting a different job, my friend. Vendor lock-in with housing is real.

Re: Who died and left the US $7B?

#324

Post by morpheuskafka »

rKarpinski wrote: post #160
dh2022 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author certainly makes this a plausible explanation. And yet I am thinking- if this is indeed the case, why we did not see similar payments this size more often?

Tax avoidance strategies aren't exactly advertised so it could be a novel tactic; and it probably would require an absurd liquid net worth to be worth pursuing (it might even preclude Texas billionaires like Michael Dell or Christy Walton)

Surprisingly some people are apparently advertising tax advoidance strategies, which is why the IRS has the authority to regulate "promoters" of certain schemes, such as a recently popular one where unuseful land is donated to conservation to generate a large deduction.

Re: Who died and left the US $7B?

#325

Post by danm »

Maybe a consumption tax with broad exemptions for necessary goods like food, clothing, shelter, etc would be a nice way of dealing with the issues people seem to have with others having wealth.

Billionaire heirs use the inheritance to buy a yacht, big tax bill, mostly use the inheritance to continue funding things that are generally good for society, smaller tax bill.

Re: Who died and left the US $7B?

#326

Post by lazide »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #317
geysersam wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a funny argument the one about the family farm. In this case it's not even about inheritance tax. It's a sob story about a guy who couldn't inherit the farm because his dad owed the state money because they had let him not pay tax on his capital gains for a long time. Sorry for not tearing up.

Not even sure why I should be upset in the first place. If I get fired from my job, nobody is going to run to my aid crying that I deserved that job because my daddy worked really hard to put me through school (he didn't, but that's besides the point) and he wanted me to have it. No, I just get fired. How is a family farm any different? It's just an asset. Birthrights shouldn't exist past citizenship.

Because the idea of leaving something to your kids (and a legacy beyond oneself) is a fundamental motivator for most people?

Re: Who died and left the US $7B?

#327

Post by mcguirep »

_bin_ wrote: post #162
Jedd wrote: post #94

A fascinating reddit post was mentioned here about a month ago - about the mildly famous (if a little macabre) 'Buy, Borrow, Die' cycle used by the obscenely-wealthy to - multi-generationally - avoid tax obligations. https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26... HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408772

This is something people love to rage about, yet it's not one with an obvious fix. The counterpoint is that this leaves money invested, which means others invest in other things, and still entails interest payments. It exists in part because you don't want someone who inherited his parents' house and wants to move in to go broke trying to pay taxes, or have to re-mortgage it, with an even stronger case with family fa…

If one believes it’s a big problem, it seems to me there’s an easy solution that doesn’t disrupt anything else. If you use a stock as collateral like that, it’s a taxable event that steps the basis of the stock by the amount of the loan. No unnecessary taxation of assets at rest, no double taxation later because of the step up in basis, and you close the loophole if you view it as such.

Re: Who died and left the US $7B?

#328

Post by freejazz »

Log_out_ wrote: post #220
_bin_ wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just arbitrarily set the status quo that way, can't just sneak a premise that the state has default a right to collect a piece of arbitrary appreciation on an asset (as all assets are used for speculation) when the owner hasn't actually gotten cash from that, and that any government that doesn't tax that is just cutting someone a break on something rightfully owed. The state of nature is no tax, and as it's…

yes, we can. the whole premise of a democracy is that every law is a solid majority away from being turned over.one of the reasons big money is inherent anti-democratic.

Really? We're a 'solid majority' away from murder being made legal?

Re: Who died and left the US $7B?

#329

Post by bluGill »

kouru225 wrote: post #255

If the US was really capitalist it would publish the wealth leaderboards for everyone to see

You can't really do that because there is no way to know how much someone is worth. What is my house worth - there is no answer until I sell it. You know what it last sold for, but you have no idea if I fixed it up since then so it is worth more; or maybe I was cooking meth and now it is a toxic waste site with negative value. A house is simple to value compared to a business. A yacht is another asset that is really hard to value.

For public stocks we can at least calculate value with computers, but for some that is a minority of value. In 1960 the DOW was used because it is only 30 stocks so you can add the values up every few minutes - the S&P 500 could only be calculated at the end of the day as by the time you got the value of the last stock the value of the first had changed.

Re: Who died and left the US $7B?

#330

Post by lazide »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #268
_bin_ wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just arbitrarily set the status quo that way, can't just sneak a premise that the state has default a right to collect a piece of arbitrary appreciation on an asset (as all assets are used for speculation) when the owner hasn't actually gotten cash from that, and that any government that doesn't tax that is just cutting someone a break on something rightfully owed. The state of nature is no tax, and as it's…

> The state of nature is no tax The state of nature is no property. Billionaires can't exist without a government enforcing their property rights. Why shouldn't they pay the entity that made it possible for them to accumulate their vast wealth?

Eh, the oldest form of government is a Kingdom.

If a government won’t enforce others rights to property, eventually someone is going to form a government where everyone’s things are theirs eh? Since what other option do they have if they want to own something.

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