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We are publishing the tax secrets of the .001%

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

#551

Post by gota »

whakim wrote: post #488
syshum wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>but they are based on weighing personal freedom above all else and this is largely the primary difference between American Culture /Politics and the rest of the world, specifically European nations European nations have always been more collectivist in nature, where the US was founded on Individualism, and Individual Freedom. There are signs that the US is losing this desire, and it saddens me because unlike you I…

The framework of individualism vs. collectivism is a complicated (and pretty fraught!) sociological construct. Scholars hotly debate whether individualism/collectivism applies to individuals , societies , or some mix of the two. Individualism also exists along a spectrum (if it even exists at all!) While there might be some connection here, it seems a vast oversimplification of cultures/individual attitudes to say th…

Sadly all good discussions quickly become more complex than our threshold for undertanding without in deptghresearch...

If you have any good (and brief!) resources on this please post them; I'd like to glance at how deep this discusson goes

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

#552

Post by ineptech »

rascul wrote: post #543
ineptech wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are misinterpreting that part; you can claim the exemption in a house you've lived in for two years. "Two years out of the last five" means you can live in the house for two years, then move out of it (presumably because you bought another house) and rent it for up to three years, and then sell it and still claim the exemption. Even after that, you can sell it and still not pay taxes on it if you use the proceeds…

I don't see how our interpretations differ. You showed that there are ways for middle-class homeowners to pay the tax. Sell the house after less than five years and don't use the proceeds to purchase another house. That scenario seems to happen often enough from what I see, and it appears that the IRS will be collecting money in those cases.

> Sell the house after less than five years

You need to live there two years, not five[0].

> You showed that there are ways for middle-class homeowners to pay the tax...

I said... "on their home". If you move out of it and rent it out, it's not your home anymore, it's an investment property, which is taxed differently, as it should be. Regular people (not real estate investors or landlords, people who just own one home at a time) almost never pay taxes on a home purchase[1].

0: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

1: https://www.letmegooglethat.com/?q=do+i+need+to+pay+taxes+on...

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

#553

Post by HWR_14 »

jdsully wrote: post #467
HWR_14 wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming Gates was trying to divest from MSFT. There's no evidence he was in a hurry. You are right that insiders selling can be a signal. That's why we have laws that govern their actions. But that's because it is assumed Gates knows more than the average MSFT investor. Yes, if Bezos woke up tomorrow and wanted to crash AMZN by selling his shares, he could. But he routinely liquidates over a billion dollars w…

No assumptions are needed. He created a public divestment plan and sold 20 million shares per quarter since. While it’s normal for insiders to declare trades well in advance doing so decades prior is a bit notable. He was pretty upfront about wanting to diversify after Ballmer took over.

Sorry, yes he wanted to diversify as he was no longer in charge. I meant to write something about assuming he cared about diversifying quickly (lost faith in MSFT) as opposed to so he could reduce his risk and think less about his asset distribution.

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

#554

Post by HWR_14 »

RhysU wrote: post #521
HWR_14 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock market converts stock into a (more) liquid asset. The value of GOOG may vary day to day, but no one thinks that it's difficult to turn shares into cash.

Turning oodles of shares into cash at the prevailing price, without pushing the price adversely, is quite a trick. "Slippage" is how to research this concept.

Who suddenly needs $3 billion out of the blue? Because Bezos regularly cashes in over a billion each quarter. Is that not enough to maintain a lifestyle?

But if he wants to buy a sports team, he can probably pay directly in AMZN stock as a private transaction (well, except for possible SEC regulations.)

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

#555

Post by zo1 »

lolive wrote: post #538
TrackerFF wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in Norway, but the result isn't very accurate. For one, the wealthy don't tend to have any serious income - it's mostly capital gains for one of their holding companies or similar. Second, those numbers can be seriously "massaged" by having debt - your income will show much lower if you have any significant debt (no mater how low the interest rate is). For normal / regular people, the public figure gives you a v…

I am no expert but how can you reduce your income tax with debt? I thought only companies could include their debts into their global accounting, not individuals.

Interest paid on debt is seen as an expense. In some tax codes (like in SA) expenses like that offset your taxable income as a private entity.

To be fair the lines get blurry because tax codes like to tax individuals differently to business entities. E.g individuals get taxed on mostly gross profit (income) whereas companies get taxed on net profit after expenses.

IMHO the whole thing would probably be filled with less gaps if we just relied on one of the two or unified them.

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

#556

Post by whakim »

gota wrote: post #551
whakim wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The framework of individualism vs. collectivism is a complicated (and pretty fraught!) sociological construct. Scholars hotly debate whether individualism/collectivism applies to individuals , societies , or some mix of the two. Individualism also exists along a spectrum (if it even exists at all!) While there might be some connection here, it seems a vast oversimplification of cultures/individual attitudes to say th…

Sadly all good discussions quickly become more complex than our threshold for undertanding without in deptghresearch... If you have any good (and brief!) resources on this please post them; I'd like to glance at how deep this discusson goes

Two important foundational works are Markus and Kitayama's Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation, and Triandis' Individualism and Collectivism. I am not a social psychologist so I don't have a really simple introduction that I can recommend (due to lack of familiarity!). But I have seen how, in a related field, overly simplistic and un-nuanced applications of what is actually a pretty complicated framework has lead to shoddy research and bad conclusions. That's why I called it out here.

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

#557

Post by sagarm »

LatteLazy wrote: post #431
ksec wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>eliminates information asymmetries between workers and employers in wage bargaining. WOW! Never heard of this as an argument. I think it is a very good one for working class.

(not OP) There is good evidence that when wages are public knowledge minorities and women get paid more too... https://time.com/5353848/salary-pay-transparency-work/

From your own article:

However, there isn’t enough research to definitively link pay transparency to pay equality. At U.S. government agencies, most of which are required to publicly release pay information, women make 81% of what men make, according to the 2017 report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. In the private sector, where the majority of companies don’t have pay transparency policies, women earn 79% of what their male counterparts make.

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

#558

Post by munificent »

paul_f wrote: post #476
munificent wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess I could focus on it by simply quoting the article farther down?

> UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, whose research helped put wealth inequality back on the American policy agenda, played a part in designing Warren's wealth tax. He says it was designed explicitly with European failures in mind.

> He argues the Warren plan is "very different than any wealth tax that has existed anywhere in the world." Unlike in the European Union, it's impossible to freely move to another country or state to escape national taxes. Existing U.S. law also taxes citizens wherever they are, so even if they do sail to a tax haven in the Caribbean, they're still on the hook. On top of that, Warren's plan includes an "exit tax," which would confiscate 40 percent of all a person's wealth over $50 million if they renounce their citizenship.

> Warren's tax is also only limited to the super rich, whereas in Europe the threshold was low enough to also hit the sort-of rich. This higher threshold helps it avoid problems like someone having a family business that makes them look rich on paper but, in fact, they're short on the cash needed to pay the tax.

> Also important, Zucman argues, the higher threshold means only a small group will be affected. And smaller groups have a harder time fighting for exemptions, which hurt European efforts. Some countries, for example, exempted artwork and antiques on the grounds they were hard to value. It's true, but it creates a huge loophole: Buy lots of art! Economists hate incentives like these because they distort markets. Warren's proposal calls for no exemptions.

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

#559

Post by rllearneratwork »

ryandrake wrote: post #307
rllearneratwork wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you heard about different cost of living in different places? What if the person plans to fund himself/herself in the retirement and pay for kids college rather than expecting all that "for free" from the government?

There is no metro region on Earth where $1M/year can be considered middle class.

1M/year is roughly 500K after taxes in Bay Area. Starter house is bad school district (means you need to pay 25K-45K per year per kid for private school) is over 1M.

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

#560

Post by camgunz »

nemothekid wrote: post #295
camgunz wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're extending "working class" to mean "people who live on wages instead of capital". But most people make an additional distinction inside wage earners between workers and professionals, i.e. mechanics, factory workers, nurses, assistants vs. doctors, lawyers, software engineers, managers, etc. It's helpful in this little side discussion because policies that might affect people with (as GP says) any abili…

> I think you're extending "working class" to mean "people who live on wages instead of capital". But most people make an additional distinction inside wage earners between workers and professionals, i.e. mechanics, factory workers, nurses, assistants vs. doctors, lawyers, software engineers, managers, etc. This is a meaningless distinction because there was a time where mechanics and factory workers also made 6 figu…

It maybe was meaningless when that was true, but unfortunately it isn't now. There are so many differences between the professional class and the working class that it's hard to really think where to start, huge things like health outcomes, educational opportunities, bankruptcy risk, air pollution, wealth generation, political engagement, social politics, fertility rate.

I don't disagree that there are also huge differences between people making income from wages vs. capital, but that's beside the point.

Your comment about actors and basketball players confuses me a little. I think those are textbook high wage earners, not people who primarily live on capital (at least until they retire anyway). And presumably yeah, once you cross $100m (which I would guess not that many actors/athletes really do), it seems reasonable for a wealth tax to kick in. Isn't wealth wealth? Why should we make carve outs for specific professions?

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