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We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%

propublica.org

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Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%

#471

Post by rexreed »

ihumanable wrote: post #393
rexreed wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't understand how wealth and income can be conflated like this. We have an income tax, so, no duh, we tax income, not wealth. Criticizing the income tax because it doesn't tax wealth is like criticizing sales tax because it doesn't tax property values. They aren't the same. I don't get how ProPublica can take such a stance. Either it's intentional, which is bad, or it's unintentional, which is even worse?

80% of the actual article, https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov... , is discussing this exact thing. This isn't a case where there's a journalistic sleight-of-hand, trying to conflate and confuse wealth and income. one could argue that the entire thesis of the article is that because we tax income and not wealth, those with wealth avoid ever realizing income, relying on loans instead of income…

Well yeah that's obvious. I could summarize this whole article by saying that wealthy people don't pay much income tax because they don't report much taxable income. Since we don't tax wealth separately from income, they don't pay much tax.

There, I summarized all their intense reporting in an obvious way. What does it tell us? Nothing that we don't already know.

All they are arguing about is taxing wealth separately from taxing income. That will never happen for many reasons.

Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%

#472

Post by HatchedLake721 »

GordonS wrote: post #469
bwestergard wrote: post #7

In Finland, everyone's taxable income is a matter of public record. One theoretical benefit of such a policy is that it eliminates information asymmetries between workers and employers in wage bargaining.

I wholeheartedly agree, and I'd be in favour of such a system here in the UK. That said, I'm not sure it would work in the US, where individualism has been taken to such extreme lengths - I could imagine it being used as bragging rights, rather than a source of moral embarrassment as it would be in Europe and Scandinavia.

Moral embarrassment of what?

Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%

#475

Post by paul_f »

teachingassist wrote: post #334
TimPC wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that it hurts the sheep as well, it's that it hurts the sheep almost entirely. Raising capital gains would be a decent idea that forces the rich to pay more. Basically zero support for it. Closing loopholes helps too, not what we're seeing in tax policy discussions which focus on rates instead. Raising the top rate on income when most of the ultra-rich's money comes from investment isn't making sens…

> Basically zero support for it. Wealth taxes are extremely well-supported, despite the media as an industry [and politicians] being owned by people strongly motivated to campaign against it all costs, e.g.: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-inequality-p...

The "idea" of wealth tax is liked, the reality is that is has never been implemented successfully. Everywhere it has been tried, it has been rolled back.

Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%

#476

Post by paul_f »

munificent wrote: post #277
whiddershins wrote: post #92

Every time someone tries to make a tax targeting the ultra rich, it ends up hurting the moderately wealthy instead. Every. Single. Time. The worse tax situation is always the person who makes 500k in a good year, or sells a house they held for 25 years which went up a bunch in value. I suspect this is a significant factor in social mobility. Our tax system is punitive to people who try to leave the working class.

Every single time someone tries to make a tax targeting the ultra rich, someone writes a comment just like this. Every. Single. Time. As far as I can tell, this comment is semantically identical to: "Every time someone tries a new cancer therapy, it ends up not helping the worst cancers." "The sting operation was a failure because it only caught low- and mid-level criminals." "We shouldn't use automated tests because…

Maybe you should focus on how you would avail the failures of past attempts:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/26/698057356/if-a...

>In 1990, twelve countries in Europe had a wealth tax. Today, there are only three

>France's wealth tax contributed to the exodus of an estimated 42,000 millionaires between 2000 and 2012, among other problems. Only last year, French president Emmanuel Macron killed it.

Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%

#477

Post by HWR_14 »

WalterBright wrote: post #466
HWR_14 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at the 500k level most of them aren't getting capital gains. Or is this "anyone can be a multimillionaire - just play the lottery and get lucky" level of technically true?

They're getting capital gains any time they sell a stock for more than they paid. There's no magic threshhold of $500k.

>There's no magic threshhold of $500k.

In the US in 2021 (aka, right now) the magic threshold for capital gains is $445,850-$501,600 depending on filing status. So you're technically correct that $500k isn't a magic threshold, but it's certainly in the middle of it.

But more importantly, you're going down a technical rabbithole. The point of this comment chain is "what happens to people experiencing a one-time windfall capital gains of $500,000". The response was "what about RH investors". My point was they weren't making 500k, so it was irrelevant that they made income taxed as a capital gain. And I stand by that.

Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%

#478

Post by filoeleven »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #276
lumost wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there is no way to track what flows into his bank account. Evidence says that he can avoid being taxed on any dollars flowing to his bank account. This wasn't a huge problem a century ago due to the Estate tax ensuring that estates would shrink over time and eventually be taxed. In stark contrast to European laws that required estates to be maintained in their entirety to preserve the aristocracy.…

Off topic, just for your information: gentile in English is not the same word as in, for example, French. The English word means not-Jewish whereas I think you probably meant gentle which has an archaic meaning of noble . See https://www.lexico.com/definition/gentle

The modern equivalent (though it is not often encountered either) is “genteel”, which I think roughly mimics the French pronunciation of the original word, but with a hard “g”. Sure looks like a cognate to me.

Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%

#479

Post by ericmcer »

HWR_14 wrote: post #419
kristjansson wrote: post #388

The conflation of change in mark-to-market net worth with income has got a whole lot to do with the constant breathless reporting of "Bezos/Gates/Buffet/... made/lost x BILLION dollars today" every time the market moves by more than a point. Sure, I get they want to beat the drum on wealth inequality, and perhaps that's a drum worth beating. But its a disingenuous disservice to pretend that these people are sitting o…

I never followed this chain of logic. The whole point behind the stock market is to treat any commonly traded stock as a liquid asset. Why do you think that this fails with respect to Bezos and Gates?

Everything is different when you start dealing with billions vs a few dollars. If Gates decided to liquidate his stock and use the money to buy real estate in Seattle he would decimate the stock, wreck the housing market, and get sued by shareholders. You can't just move money around and have actual goods and services appear out of thin air. That's why it's dumb when people say things like: "Those fighter jets costs 50,000 college educations".

Re: We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%

#480

Post by HWR_14 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #75
naasking wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flat tax is too regressive. What seems justified is a basic S-curve indexed by income, and where the left hand side dips below zero so those below a certain line effectively get a negative income tax to maintain a certain standard of living.

Many of the ultra-wealthy have little or no income. What needs to be taxed is wealth, not income.

The wealth have increased asset value instead of income. If we can capture that, that's probably sufficient.
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