Tax Details of US Super-Rich Allegedly Leaked (bbc.com) 399
According to the BBC, details claiming to reveal how little U.S. billionaires pay in income tax have been leaked to investigative website ProPublica. From the report: ProPublica says it has seen the tax returns of some of the world's richest people, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett. The website alleges Amazon's Mr Bezos paid no tax in 2007 and 2011, while Tesla's Mr Musk's paid nothing in 2018. The FBI and tax authorities are looking into the source of the leak. ProPublica said it was analyzing what it called a "vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data" on the taxes of the billionaires, and would release further details over coming weeks.
ProPublica said the richest 25 Americans pay less in tax -- an average of 15.8% of adjusted gross income -- than most mainstream US workers. The website said: "Using perfectly legal tax strategies, many of the uber-rich are able to shrink their federal tax bills to nothing or close to it." The wealthy, as with many ordinary citizens, are able to reduce their income tax bills via such things as charitable donations and drawing money from investment income rather wage income.
ProPublica said the richest 25 Americans pay less in tax -- an average of 15.8% of adjusted gross income -- than most mainstream US workers. The website said: "Using perfectly legal tax strategies, many of the uber-rich are able to shrink their federal tax bills to nothing or close to it." The wealthy, as with many ordinary citizens, are able to reduce their income tax bills via such things as charitable donations and drawing money from investment income rather wage income.
Wise (Score:2)
Such lying rabble rousers. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Such lying rabble rousers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, I can borrow against the increased value of those shares and spend the money. No taxes due, despite leveraging the increase in value into cash ("actualized").
I don't do this like ordinary people, because I am a billionaire, so I don't have to pay the high interest rates that brokers demand when I borrow against the value of my shares. Instead, because it is larger amounts of money, I only have to pay the lowest of interest rates.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not if you die first. Your heirs may have to pay estate duties (which will be reduced because of the outstanding loans), but no income taxes.
Re: (Score:2)
Jeff Bezos literally had no income in 2007 or 2011?
Let's see
In that year, Bezos, who filed his taxes jointly with his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, reported a paltry (for him) $46 million in income, largely from interest and dividend payments on outside investments. He was able to offset every penny he earned with losses from side investments and various deductions, like interest expenses on debts and the vague catchall category of âoeother expenses.â
Cool system.
Re: (Score:2)
Tax deductions can do that for you, if you've got a competent accountant.
Re: Such lying rabble rousers. (Score:2)
A clever person would look and see if Bezos had some large offsetting charitable donation to lower his taxes. Holding a billion dollars in AMZ stock is not the same as earning a billion dollars from your job. Bezos pays taxes on shares sold, not shares held.
Re: (Score:2)
It's really easy to tell here who didn't read the article because they say things like this in ignorance of the step-up in basis.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, that's definitely how it works in its absolute simplicity. Jeff Bezos is building a fucking rocket to space because he has zero point zero dollars in his bank account because all his wealth is tied up in stocks. He's really just a pauper in disguise!
It's all fucking bullshit and you know it. These people are doing things only billionaires can do because those stocks are a form of wealth that the banks recognize as collateral. We KNOW they're worth something, so don't try to pretend that they aren't. S
Everything favors the rich (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Her husband was high in management in a local company Cisco eventually bought and he apparently was making really big money. She was doing pretty well herself, but clearly her husband was just in a whole other league salary wise from the rest of us because....
2) They owned a 2nd home. For vacations. The only person I personally knew besides her who owned a 2nd home was a doctor friend of mine. And he was doing very well financially.
3) Her family's hobby - no joke - was hot air ballooning. Do you know what kind of people do hot air ballooning as a hobby? Rich people.
4) They had a nanny. Mostly this was because hubby didn't like taking care of their kids and didn't have time for it and her job took up enough time that they simply had to have help since hubby was pretty much providing zero help there. So their nanny was an illegal immigrant from Russia in her mid to late 20s. Wanna bet that they "forget" to report what they paid the nanny on their yearly tax returns to Uncle Sam?
So you've read this and I bet that at no point did you think "Boy, these are exactly the people who need a free SUV". But they got one. Mary also told me this. So at the time, there was some law that was designed to help small business people buy trucks for their businesses. So if you were maybe a contractor, you could buy a truck for your business and fully deduct the value off your taxes. I think you had to buy it outright to do this - I don't think you could finance it. Guess what else is legally a "truck"? An SUV! So Mary's husband set up some kind of sham company he owned, bought an SUV outright "for the company" (wink wink) and deducted the full value off his income taxes as a "business expense" for his company. To be honest with you, I got pretty tired of having all that kind of insight into some rich person's "problems" and after she was eventually given a very generous severance package to leave the company, I lost track of her by choice.
Re:Everything favors the rich (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, that law helping businesses buy trucks was designed rather poorly. Bad laws = bad results.
Also those kids are gonna have problems in life. Guaranteed.
Re: (Score:2)
How many of the middle class have used home businesses* and their deductions to lower their taxes as well as get stuff they normally couldn't?
*Back in my era it was things like Shaklee and the like.
Re:Everything favors the rich (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't badly designed, it was working as intended.
This is how politicians funnel money to rich people (themselves included). Create a law that is superficially designed to help the people who elected them, but is actually a massive bung for them and their pals.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Everything favors the rich (Score:5, Insightful)
It's even worse than that. I think a lot of "well they should have written a better law" crown are just showing off their arrogance and hubris. Here's how I like to think about it.
The law is like writing programs which execute in the real world. The programming language is a mix of legalese-English and butchered Latin which while more controlled than plain English is still full of ambiguities and it's meaning changes over time. The programs are then executed on a stochastic machine (laws, judges) and can yield wildly different results with the same input, not that the same inputs can ever provided twice anyway. Fault conditions (going up through the courts) can take years to execute. Execution is extremely expensive (it's a court case) so you can't have any unit tests.
You're also executing in a huge environment of interacting modules some of which haven't been properly updated in a thousand years. All variables are global and access control is determined entirely at runtime (i.e. execution of a law that says whether or not party A can regulate thing B) by the same stochastic machine.
Now imagine what the pull request process is. Firstly, every asshole gets a say. You know how it is writing code, you hope "that guy" doesn't spot your pull request and hope you get to merge after having the requisite reviews from the sensible engineers. Oh but if "that guy" sees it, you just know it will degenerate into endless bikeshedding on a mix of design, conventions and style guidelines (which he wants to rehash YET AGAIN). Yeah well with your legal code that guy gets to see it every time. And there are hundreds of them and they all get a say. And if they talk long enough your PR is automatically closed without merging.
And they you've got to make sure your fix doesn't break something in production. Your code, like a big library is used by maybe millions of people with usecases in circumstances you aren't even aware of and there are too many every to be knowledgeable about them. So some guy comments on your PR to let you know how much you're screwing him over and you now have to decide if they guy has a a real point and you're about to utterly fuck him or he's simply trying to pull a fast one (and that's lobbying even if you're not taking cash from lobbyists).
And if you finally get your code out in production, you have a massive army of hackers all attacking it using every means necessary and every side channel, spec deficiency, edge case, adversarial input, because they have a large financial incentive to do so.
And if you find a bug, well, For any given area of code you only get to fix bugs once a year if you're lucky and your Jira backlog has unresolved tickets from the late middle ages.
Really the only reason the world works is because 99.9% of people aren't acting like assholes operating juuuust within the letter of the law every time. If everyone acted like an asshole all the time (as people on this thread are praising billionaires for), society would fall apart.
Re: Everything favors the rich (Score:3)
Deducting the value of a BUSINESS expense, like a truck, doesn't make it free!
I buy a $60K SUV as a business expense, I depreciate the expense and 'poof' my taxable income is reduced by $60K, the value of the deduction. If I was paying 33% tax rate, that nets me $20K in tax savings - making the $60K SUV cost 'only' $40K.
I pay $60K for the SUV, I save $20K on taxes, so the truck only cost $40K.
Now, play the same game with a 95% tax rate - you'd pay $5K for a $100K SUV after you deduct 95% of the purchase pri
Re: Everything favors the rich (Score:3)
If they falsely claimed a business deduction, turn them in - it's already a crime, and your keeping it a secret makes you complicit.
To qualify as a deduction the SUV (truck) needed to exceed a certain cost and weight threshold - I remember seeing a poster explaining this at the local Range Rover dealership.
Do you think contractors shouldn't be able to deduct their trucks?
This reminds me about the whole private airplane argument around 2008 - somehow business owners deducting business jets as business expens
Re: Everything favors the rich (Score:3)
Owning a second home isn't nearly as unusual as you seem to think it is. Countless families own 'cabins by a lake' or 'cabins in the mountains', an RV or a boat with a sleeping compartment - btw, the boat and RV qualify as 'second hones' and the interest paid on them, like your primary residence, is deductible, to a certain threshold.
If we actually taxed their wealth... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I hate to break it to you, but the US has an "exit tax". It's not so simple to get rid of your citizenship and leave the country without paying a lot of tax, unless all your assets are already overseas and you don't plan on ever returning (even for a visit).
By your logic, there would be no wealthy swiss (Score:3)
Then they would do one of two things: 1. They would kill their citizenship and leave the country. Bill Gates has said he would do this. 2. They would have to sell assets like stocks to pay the tax bill. This would decimate the stock market. Now I agree that they should not be as wealthy as they are, at a certain point it's theft from a government that has given then every break imaginable, but a lot of their money does go back into the economy in the form of job creation and propping up financial markets.
You know other countries have wealth taxes, right? I doubt Bill Gates said this, but let me tell you something about Billionaires...they lie and they lie often...remember our last president? How about Bloomberg? How about all the lies Bill Gates has told, both about Microsoft as well as his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein?
By your logic, billionaires would ONLY exist in countries with favorable tax rates. There are billionaires in nearly every European country.
If you taxed the wealthy more, here
Comparison is the thief of happiness (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone will always have more than you, someone will always have less than you.
Don't be concerned with the portion size your neighbor has in their bowl, just be concerned if they have a bowl or not, and if there's a portion in it.
Re:Comparison is the thief of happiness (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't about comparison, it's about people paying their fair share.
Understand this (Score:2, Informative)
...this speaks to the incompetence and corruption of our political leaders, nothing else.
Don't let yourself get sucked into being a class-warfare tool for ardent Marxists.
"The rich should pay more...because they can!"
That's convenient bullshit. Don't buy it.
When's the last time you paid more for something than you had to? Because if you're sitting in EU or US I guarantee that to most of the rest of the world YOU ARE RICH.
Who didn't already know this? (Score:3)
Warren Buffett, in particular, famously said [youtube.com] he pays lower taxes than his secretary.
Unlike the rest of them, he has actually tried to do something about [cnn.com] it too.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:income is not "wealth" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: income is not "wealth" (Score:2)
Like the home mortgage deduction? SALT deduction? Dependent deductions? Healthcare expenses?
Re: income is not "wealth" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: income is not "wealth" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Get rid of all of them. Make the first 25k of income/person 100% deductible, everything else follows a similar graduated system that we have today. By the time you get above 500k every dollar earned should be split 50/50.
Won't work. They'll figure out a way to not earn anything.
What's needed is a tax on what people spend, with no deductions allowed over about $50,000/year.
Re: income is not "wealth" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: income is not "wealth" (Score:5, Insightful)
A progressive system is fair, it just hides the true cost of things.
A minimum wage job isn't viable to live on. But we also don't want to pay more for stuff, and a lot of people actually feel that people should only be paid 10 bucks/hour or whatever on principal. So there has to be a way of making it fair, or the minimum wage people will either fall into extreme poverty or rise up and overthrow the rest of us.
Progressive taxation tries to fix that with some wealth transfer, but disguised as tax. They blame the government when they see the deduction from their paycheque, not the poverty level wages.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Because people that make a lot more money can afford to share more of the burden of the society that made them wealthy. And I say this as someone who pays much more tax burden than a lot of other people - and I don't mind, because I like having a fire department that can respond within minutes if my house is on fire, and a police department that is a reasonable deterrent to someone kicking in my door and stealing my shit. I like having roads that get repaired. I like having a government that worries abou
Re:income is not "wealth" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:income is not "wealth" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:income is not "wealth" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:income is not "wealth" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
1) Borrow money and pay interest to say a HK entity, but hey that HK entity will NEVER ask for the loan back because it was really under control of the borrower.
I'm a little lost how this works. Say I'm Bezos. I have Amazon create a shell company and fund it with a billion dollars. I borrow money from the shell company (so it's not income) at 0% interest and just never bother paying it back?
Yeah, sounds like tax evasion to me. My wife, an ex-tax accountant, tells me one of the criteria the IRS and tax courts look at is whether there's a legitimate business purpose to a transaction (tax law not being as nearly cut and dried as you might think). In this case, there's
Re:income is not "wealth" (Score:5, Insightful)
see topic.
folks who are outraged by this should be required to pay "income" tax on their houses every year, or their used car, or used graphics cards in the last year, even if they don't sell them , e.g. it's "wealth" in that you own it, no?
Most comments fall victim to reading the summary and not reading the article.
You seem to be responding to content from one of the articles and ignoring the summary (which probably confuses most people reading your comment).
I believe you're responding to the "true tax rate" column in the ProPublica article which takes the increase in wealth for the ultra-rich (ie, how much their investments increased in value), and divides the income tax they paid by that number to calculate a "true tax rate".
That number is of course nonsensical (though a starting point if you're looking at a wealth tax).
However, the "15.8% of adjusted gross income" tax rate for the ultra-wealthy (which the BBC attributes to ProPublica, though I didn't find it there), IS a number based on actual income, and it's probably a number that should be higher.
Re: (Score:3)
Seems to be cheap to gamble on investments and have losses than it is to pay taxes. Maybe we shouldn't be subsidizing losses.
Re: (Score:2)
Eliminating loss carry-forward would go a long way towards increasing the amount that the top .1% pay every year. Not sure if the results would be pretty, but if that's what you want . . .
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps just limiting how many years the loss carry-forward is, or average the income over a couple of years rather then decades of loss carry-forward.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you serious? Take a look at Trump's leaked tax returns. They guy eliminated entire years worth of tax payments by carrying forward losses on past investments.
Re:income is not "wealth" (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The rich should pay more. Period.
The article itself is misleading to people who just want their opinion vindicated. For exammple, Buffet, pays relatively the least, but he also is donating 99.9% of his wealth when he passes away, which is something that Bill Gates is also doing, but not Bezos or Musk.
Honestly if I'm betting, I'm sincerely hoping that Bezos and Musk both launch themselves into space and never come back. I do not wish death upon them, but I think if they are confident enough that they won't d
Re: (Score:3)
Their wealth is in stock. Seize it, which you cannot do in the US, and now government owns stock. This buys it nothing and politicians want the money to spend.
So they sell the stock, its price collapses, and it wasn't worth anywhere near what you thought.
And the price goes down even more because there's less desire to work hard building a company with the risks of failure multiplied by the chance of seizure should you succeed.
Um.... I pay income taxes on my house every year (Score:3)
How is it that, in the year of our lord 2021, I'm still hearing this argument that a wealth tax is bad because it'll be applied to everyday working Joes when everyday working Joes *already* pay a wealth tax...
I know the answer (billionaires own the media so the media is biased) but still... we've got the internet. We should all b
And if you've given it away to charity ... (Score:4, Insightful)
True.
Also, the summary mentions that in large part they didn't pay income taxes on money that they gave away to charity.
Consider these two scenarios:
A. I tell my boss "please don't pay me more than $100K. Anything else you would have paid me, please give it to charity instead.
Obviously I'd pay income taxes on the 100K of income I have, not on money that my boss gave to charity.
B. The company pays me $200,000 and I immediately give $100,000 of that away to charity.
The tax code treats option B the same as option A, because it *is* the same.
Except by giving away after you get it, you pay a MORE tax because the charitable deduction is offset by the standard deduction.
So those who give are paying MORE tax, not less, on the money they actually get/keep for themselves.
If Oprah gives $80 million to charities and takes $300,000 for herself, then pays $150,000 in taxes, this article calls that 0% taxes. It's actually a 50% tax rate, on the money she kept to spend for herself.
Re: (Score:2)
interesting.
it would be very useful if a tutorial could show how an average person could use the same tax strategies
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It's Money for People.
Re: And if you've given it away to charity ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Easy.
Accumulate massive wealth - low eight-figures should suffice
Invest all your money
Only sell enough of your investments to fund your lifestyle
You only pay taxes on the profits from your investments when you sell them, not as the increase in value.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't have to have eight figures. Most of the middle class uses this strategy to accumulate enough money so they can sit on their asses for a third of their adult life. They call it "retirement."
Re: (Score:2)
You only pay taxes on the profits from your investments when you sell them, not as the increase in value.
Noting that any dividends and/or capital gains paid out are taxed regardless of if they're paid out or reinvested. While capital gains are *usually* what you'd realize from selling something, many mutual funds pay out capital gains, along with dividends, throughout the year, usually quarterly.
The tax rate differs depending on if they're short-term (held for one year pr less) or long-term capital gains and qualified or unqualified (or ordinary) dividends. Short-term capital gains and unqualified dividends
Top tax reduction tips for average people (Score:3)
> it would be very useful if a tutorial could show how an average person could use the same tax strategies
For the deduction for charitable giving it's pretty simple, two steps:
1. Give away lots of money
2. Keep the receipts
Whatever money you give to 503(c) charities (registered true nonprofits), you don't pay taxes on. To get your income tax to zero, give away all of your money.
As far as tax tips that will actually make a difference for the average person, there are three:
401k/IRA
HSA
FSA
401k means you're
"Given it away" to a charity you control... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
The ones that control foundations, yes. It's an interesting tax dodge/money laundering scheme.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that your calculation is wrong because, if your employer gives away the money before paying it to you, your taxes are not going to be reduced by the full amount (your top marginal rate on $100k), because of the standard deduction.
But if you really want to look for unfairness, look at the way medical insurance premiums are handled: employer pays, reduces your income and taxes. If you pay the premiums, you have to pay tax on all your income with no allowance for the premium (unless you hit the 7% thre
Re: (Score:2)
That is unConstitutional in the United States. Only income is taxable.
Re: (Score:2)
Not strictly true. The Feds can tax people in states, but that tax would be subject to the apportionment rule. Also, it appears that the SCOTUS has weakened this rule:
https://www.americanbar.org/gr... [americanbar.org]
Re: (Score:2)
No. Wealth tax aka envy tax, means you own nothing. The government owns it and you rent it. They just call it a tax.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't be daft. Or naive. He didn't work *that* hard, he mostly got luckier.
Many people work far, far harder and are far, far smarter than him, but they didn't have the blessing and headstart he did.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What a coincidence that all the rich people out there are dumb and lucky while you're a genius poor. It's truly tragic.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It's actually white collar middle class that works the least.
Working class = Work really hard out of necessity, sometimes multiple low wage jobs.
Middle class = Work a 40 hour week.
Rich = Often abnormal levels of ambition. Working 80+ hours per week pretty normal.
As it happens, it's also the middle and upper middle classes that have the most free time to complai
Defer, defer, defer, die. (Score:4, Informative)
That's what a tax accountant told me once as far as tax strategy. The deal is that you aren't avoiding paying taxes, but deferring the bill in perpetuity. Basically until you are dead and then there is some other tax strategy as far as the inheritance tax you can employ.
Regardless, unless we just start closing all the loopholes, even the so-called 'good' ones, there will be exploits available.
Flat tax, flat tax, where art thou flat tax?
Re: (Score:3)
It doesn't have to be a flat tax. Progressive taxes aren't a loophole.
It does sound like the US has way too many loopholes though. As an individual, I can't defer losses *or* gains. My income for the year is what it is, and that's it.
Re: (Score:3)
I'll never understand how so many people blame rich people for trying to hold on to their money.
You should be blaming the government that let our ridiculous tax law happen in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll never understand how so many people blame rich people for trying to hold on to their money.
We do the same. It's called piracy.
Re: (Score:2)
You can do both.
Re:let me get this straight (Score:5, Informative)
I know that reading the article is totally unslashdotty, but the article says that Musk *is* paying taxes, $455M in 2014-2018.
Re: (Score:2)
I know that reading the article is totally unslashdotty, but the article says that Musk *is* paying taxes, $455M in 2014-2018.
Damn. There's literally an order less interest in your truth-telling.
Maybe, you don't completely understand the media you post in.
Re: (Score:2)
I know that reading the article is totally unslashdotty, but the article says that Musk *is* paying taxes, $455M in 2014-2018.
Yes, and one would think his CPA is a moron for paying *that much* on $1.5 billion in income.
(Lest we forget the other fourteen fucking billion he took in stock payouts. The IRS certainly forgot.)
The government should stop bitching about tax coffers not being replenished when they purposely allow these kinds of blatant loopholes to live and thrive. ($455M on his actual income, amounts to a whopping 3% in taxes.)
Re: let me get this straight (Score:2)
People that use the roads pays for them.
His company trucks pay for the roads to the extent they use the roads.
Why aren't you upset that Ford, GM, Chrysler done pay for the roads?
Re: (Score:2)
People that use the roads pays for them.
Only if their vehicles use gasoline or diesel. Taxes on those fuels are used to fund maintenance on roads. If your vehicle uses electricity, you don't pay that tax and your vehicle, which is heavier than a standard vehicle, contributes to the wear and degradation of the roads.
His company trucks pay for the roads to the extent they use the roads.
Again, only if they use gasoline or diesel. If his company trucks use electricity they are not paying taxes to help maintain and repair roads.
Why aren't you upset that Ford, GM, Chrysler done pay for the roads?
Because the OP has it wrong. The companies don't pay (directly) for road repair and mainten
Re: let me get this straight (Score:5, Informative)
Washington State has an extra $150 registration fee for electric vehicles, and a think they just passed a bill to raise it another $75.
They also charge a "weight fee" on my 550 lb motorcycle.
They always have their hand out.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, one source of money for road maintenance is vehicle fuel taxes. Electric cars are creating a shortfall since they don't require fuel. So it makes sense to tax them so they can pay their fair share of road maintenance.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are we subsidizing the losses of the wealthy?
Re: Wealth vs income (Score:2)
Right. We should remove every incentive to encourage them to take a risk and create some jobs.
BTW, that means when you buy a stock and lose money when you sell it, you can't deduct the losses either. Or if you sell your house at a loss, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Does gambling in stocks or other investments really create jobs? How many jobs were created when GME and AMC went up recently? Actually doing business and needing employees creates jobs. Shuffling around financial instruments doesn't really create jobs.
Bezos has the wealth to hire the best lawyers to fight the IRS for the rest of time. I don't. What kind of incentive is that?
Re: (Score:2)
Even in my house I'm not capable of the kind of losses that people like Buffet, Bezos and Musk have. The damage to the system isn't even comparable.
We certainly don't have to subsidize losses to the extent that we do. It makes sense that the more you gamble the more you can lose.
Ironically... (Score:3)
Most manufacturing jobs left America during the exact time that taxes on the wealthy were dropping most rapidly. Many of those jobs, and the portable capital needed to support them (tens of thousands of machine tools), went to a literal Communist dictatorship.
When businesses say that they want a low-tax, high-freedom regime, and giving them that will lead to job creation, they are failing to understand themselves.
Re: Ironically... (Score:2)
The Biden admin wants all G20 countries to agree and implement a 15% minimum tax to keep companies from moving... sounds good, unless your economy needs to attract companies to create jobs in your country
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The Feds don't (and won't) tax property.
Nice scaremongering - easily disproven by Swiss (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the first thing that would happen if the government started taxing portable wealth is that it would leave. And take jobs with it. And then you would have no income and no wealth to tax.
But at least everyone would be eating bugs.
By your logic, the USA must have the CHEAPEST tax rate in the ENTIRE WORLD...and there are no wealthy people in any other place that has higher taxes.
Where is this exodus of wealthy people from European nations that tax so much more? Do they not have Billionaires in Europe? Switzerland has a wealth tax...are there no billionaires there? Where is the exodus of wealthy Swiss folks?
Also, fuck off about the jobs...if Jeff Bezos moved away, only a dozen or so jobs would go away...his butler, his chauffeur, private chef, etc. Billionaires themselves create negligible jobs. They're a SHITTY SHITTY investment compared to increased tax revenue hiring teachers, police officers, construction companies to repair your roads, firemen, etc. Amazon will keep their offices wherever it makes strategic sense, it has nothing to do with what you tax him or any other CEO.
Every multinational has many offices in many cities, many of which have unfavorable tax legislation, but provides access to good labor or some other strategic advantage.
If your statement was true, there would be no companies in California. They'd all be in Florida, Texas, West Virginia, Alabama, or whatever cousin-fucking state gave them the lowest tax rates. Why are there so many successful companies in the states that have the highest taxes, like NY, NJ, CA, MA, etc? Why are so many new companies started there? Why not relocate to Africa or the Caribbean?
I'll call your bluff. The 1% need us more than we need them. They want to relocate?...good riddance...may I suggest relocating to Russia, where you can see the fruits of the corruption you're pushing.
I hope no one is stupid enough to fall for your FUD. Tax the fuck out of those parasites. Their fortune wasn't the mere product of their excellence, but their ability to make use of the resources provided by the United States. It takes talent, no doubt, but no successful company was made purely from the glory of their founders...but from their wise leadership + the workers that built it + the investors that funded them + the local governments that did what they could to ensure they were successful. It took many talented people besides Jeff Bezos to build Amazon. He is underpaying by a huge margin and it's time we adjusted the laws to ensure people like him are paying their fair share of the operating costs of the engine that built their wealth.
Re: (Score:2)
Time to get out of the real estate development business. I don't know what the rest of you will do for housing but I'm set.
Re: (Score:2)
Won't somebody think of the poor billionaires?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
While certainly possible the leak of Trump's 1995 and 2005 tax returns weren't pinned on the IRS.
Some of the leaking of Trump (and Trump Snr) was admitted to by Trump's Niece.
There was the targetting of conservative groups for extra scrutiny (such as the Tea Party) but... that was combined with a targetting of liberal groups.
Apart from the extra scrutiny targetting, I'm unaware of any leaking of Trump Voter's tax returns.
---
In January 2014, James Comey, who at the time was the FBI director, told Fox News th
Re: (Score:2)
Comey could have recommended burying Trump under a Federal jail with full documentation of all the crimes committed and Barr wouldn't have pressed charges. Barr was the easy out for any crimes committed as he doesn't think the President can commit a crime while in office.
Re: Its good to see that the Government (Score:2)
People complying with existing tax. Ode isn't a crime - as others noted, if you are unhappy, make your case to change the tax code, but be prepared to accept the outcome.
I remember when Feds decided to tax luxury boats, since only millionaires bought them. Great. Unless you worked for a US yacht builder - you instantly lost your job when domestic boat industry went off-shore.
Re: Business as usual in third world shithole. (Score:3)
And you live where? What country is not based on stolen land? Every modern government is the result of a government imposed on native people.
Re: (Score:2)
Why Printing Trillions of Dollars May Not Cause Inflation [youtu.be]
Re: (Score:3)
It is all fun and games until you get that margin call and are forced to sell at the worst possible time.