There are so many loopholes. How do you “tax” on investments? My buddy is a millionaire and takes loans out on his investments and pays no taxes. Like WTF. I’m sitting here pay 35% and he pays almost nothing because the interest he pays can be written off.
My dad always says “but then what motivation will they have to make money and innovate.” To which I respond, “they’ll still be millionaires and far richer than either of us will ever be.”
Making money and innovation, in our society, are anathema to each other. Innovation has stagnated in favor of cutting costs and cheaping out on everything to increase margins.
I’d support higher taxes if the bulk of them went to helping people instead of inventing and perfecting new ways to kill them. Fact is I trust bezos with that money more than the federal government.
How about neither can be trusted because both have shown to not give a shit about helping people.
True. But trust isn’t binary. Bezos hasn’t bombed any hospitals, weddings, or schools that I’m aware of so he’s ahead of the US federal government for now.
He hordes money and controls the media to ensure the people dont get ahead. He’s complicit in arguably just as many deaths.
Wake me up when he starts stockpiling doomsday devices. The US federal government has roughly 4000 of them.
The government is effectively owned by billionaires which is why you don’t trust the government. But if we get rid of extreme wealth inequality then the government starts working for the rest of us. These two issues are connected. We gotta eat the rich if we want a democracy that actually works.
What in the AI hell happened to her arm?!
Billionaires make money off stocks and asset gains, so taxing income higher generally only hurts the upper middle class (i.e. doctors, high earning professionals).
In Canada the average effective tax rate actually decreases once you hit like $750k (I don’t have exact numbers, it’s been a while since I analyzed this one) because those people stop paying as much employment tax and instead pay capital gains which are taxed at 50%.
So, if you’re middle class, or upper middle class, you’re paying twice as much as the millionaires and billionaires are per additional dollar made.
And that’s the best case because the really rich people put their assets under a corporation and continually “reinvest” their gains while harvesting their losses (businesses pay 26.5% tax).
So Rich people pay a marginal rate of 26.5/26.8%, while the upper middle class pay 53.5% on their income.
I don’t know any doctor or high earning professional that makes millions of dollars per year. You’re still thinking about the wrong bracket. We’re talking about the mega wealthy, hundreds of millions to billions in net worth. Also, no, the effective tax rate never actually decreases in Canada. You get taxed at higher percentages the more money you make. Someone making $750k a year gets taxed at a higher rate, both marginally and effectively, than someone making $50k. You’re assuming that all of this extra money is just coming from capital gains. It’s not.
money is a lie, it has no value.
Agreed. When I need a medium of exchange, unit of account, and/or store of value, I just use
i too love using throughout my day, it’s especially useful during situations.
Why not 85%?
An income tax would be pointless for the wealthy. Most of their wealth is in unrealized capital gains or other investment vehicles, not from salaries.
There would need to be a mechanism to tax unrealized capital gains, or just networth in general.
They still make liquid money no? Well above what any normal person takes home.
Yes because there’s no chance that this would end up having to be paid by every homeowner whose house has gone up in value since they bought it while rich people would just find another loophole to avoid it, while the government would piss all that extra money away on wasteful spending without addressing any actual problems.
Heh, this post is about you.
They’re not wrong. The people who would write these laws are paid for by the people who would be negatively impacted by them, so I guarantee they’d be full of loopholes.
I hope you love your landlord, because with that attitude, you’ll never own a home.
Yes because there’s no chance that this would end up having to be paid by every homeowner whose house has gone up in value since they bought it
A chance? Sure. But it would require willful malicious writing of the bill. Many (most?) states have homestead protections for homeowners up to a certain conservative value. That protection could pivot to capital gains trivially. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to tax valuation skyrockets in excess of (say) $500,000. The government can depreciate those value skyrockets, and we’d still honestly be paying less than our due since property value skyrockets cause property tax decreases (in most (all) municipalities, property taxes are just the town’s expenses divided by property value).
while rich people would just find another loophole to avoid it,
In real state, that “loophole” is a law that exists in most states specifically saying you don’t have to pay tax on property gain if you follow a specified process to reinvest into property in the same calendar year. But it’s not a loophole if it’s the damn law. The only way people are dodging real estate taxes now is because they wrote laws to. A law that says “fuck off, you still have to pay” would absolutely work.
while the government would piss all that extra money away on wasteful spending without addressing any actual problems
Across the world, tax rates are largely proportional to health, happiness, and quality of life of the citizens. I prefer to trust the numbers over someone’s distrust of the country they live in.
A chance? Sure. But it would require willful malicious writing of the bill.
Have you been keeping track of politics AT ALL? You’re if fool if you don’t EXPECT precisely that to happen. The vast majority of politicians will foam at the mouth at the prospect of passing another tax and then happily add a few provisions to make sure their top donors aren’t hurt too much by it. Or do you think it’s just a tragic accident that the majority of taxes keeps getting paid by the poor and middle classes?
Across the world, tax rates are largely proportional to health, happiness, and quality of life of the citizens
I don’t have any data to prove or disprove that claim, but assuming it’s true, then there’s certainly better ways to achieve that, like increasing income tax rates on the wealthy. Yes sure, they’ll try to avoid it by deferring or offsetting gains where they can, but in the end, whatever they own, they’ll still have to convert a certain amount of it to cash in order to spend it, and that can be taxed. No need for such harebrained schemes as taxing unrealized gains.
Have you been keeping track of politics AT ALL? You’re if fool if you don’t EXPECT precisely that to happen.
I largely disagree. I don’t wear a tinfoil hat, sorry. I have seen successful execution of homestead related profit protections, and there are very few “gotchas” in it, if any, for non-millionaires.
I’m an American, so blame my patriotism. But I like to think if EVERY other country can do it, we’re not so pathetic as a country that we cannot.
like increasing income tax rates on the wealthy
There’s a ceiling on the revenue potential in that. The wealthier you get, the less your income is “income”. The wealthy don’t even try to “avoid” it, it’s just not relevant to them. Bezos wasn’t lying that year he only made $80k in income. His unrealized capital gains simply were not taxable unless he chose to sell off lots of Amazon stock (which has non-tax-related repurcussions for him).
tax unrealized capital gains
This actually happened with bitcoin a while back due to its under-regulated nature. A few people lost their pants when the value of bitcoin skyrocketed on one day in december and then plummetted in early January, and the IRS came knocking for those unrealized gains.
Largely, We don’t tax unrealized gains because unrealized gains is value that hypothetically can disappear as quickly as it shows up. It’s like taxing someone after every hand of blackjack - you can end up broke AND owing 10x your starting money in capital gains taxes. In theory, a stock portfolio can go from way-up to way-down in 24 hours. Ditto with real-estate if there manifests an uncovered loss event or the title gets fucked, or environmental regulation changes in a way that affects the property, etc.
…I’m not saying there’s not a way to do it right. It just needs to be done very VERY carefully so as not to bankrupt people. It would likely have to be more complicated than most tax law is now.
It’s just pure propaganda working out. Our society is composed of roughly the same gene pool it was composed of a millennia ago, and education clearly isn’t compensation when it gets treated more and more as just simply a place to discard children off to so people can work without interruptions.
What does this have to do with the post? We’re talking about creating a higher tax bracket, you’re talking about genes and why schools exist.
US’s schools*
To be fair this shitty way to run schools is getting to Europe too, I remember like a few months ago teachers went on strike for a few days against the government because it wanted to cut funding for schools (country wide), and considering we have pretty decent schools here (compared to the US) and cutting funding meant all of the nice things just going away (like no cafeteria, like bring your own food method, which would suck ass since I live far away from my school for example)
Lucky we didn’t hear from the government ever again after, since it was basically all the schools in the country, this happened in Czechia btw, just so anyone isn’t confused as where this happened
But honestly our government is a shit show and I am not surprised they gave up after 1 day of strike
Some dude I work with said “man, if they start taxing Bezos more, at what point are they gonna come after me?”
Maybe when you start making billions of dollars? Fuckin idiot
They’re right tho, millionaires are way more protected by government than the average person
You know what the difference is between a million and a billion? Roughly a billion.
This but actually
they already coming at that dude with taxes.
the others ain’t paying their fair share.
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Political party promises taxes for billionaires
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Political party also promises to spend that money
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Party gets elected
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Party realizes that super rich people have enough resouces to avoid any tax they can come up with as a single country
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Party still wants to live up to the promises from 2, so they try to tax large corporations
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Same problem as 4. Fun fact by the way: The nice left colonialism-hating palistine-supporting irish are the ones most responsible for big tech not paying any taxes for doing business in europe. (Double irish with a dutch sandwich)
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Party turns to the “richest” people that cannot afford tax evasion.
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I pay close to the maximum tax rate although making far less than 100k per year without any noteworthy savings
Of course it doesn’t have to go that way, I just want to point out there are reasons to be skeptical besides being a “Fuckin idiot”. Politics can turn good ideas into bad policies
I get what you’re saying but he really is a dumbass. The loopholes drive me loco man. You’re absolutely right about Ireland too. Fuck loopholes
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That dude you work with is beyond clueless.
Apparently he hasn’t noticed the rate he is already being taxed at. Guy sounds like a genius.
Are there a lot of people like this nowadays? I don’t know any, maybe I’m lucky.
I’ve never met anyone like this, I’m not convinced there’s many.
My theory is the internet loves a common enemy regardless of how prominent they are.
I truly don’t understand these people. Their life is generally stressful to the extreme and the current system of “trickle down” has been for a long time shown to not work. So why not tax the rich, install some decent social systems, make the world better for the general public and move on?
A 70% tax rate is insane. All that will do is incentivize taking money out of the country or cheating and lying and hiding all that money (even worse than now) I think a reasonable rate is around 20% or 30% and taxes should be structured where the people who make the least pay the least
They’re not temporarily embarrassed millionaires. There’s no such thing, really.
They’re groupies. They don’t care how bad their life is, they’re star-crossed and get a weird vicarious thrill from it. They know they’ll never be that rich, but as long as their star is rising, they’re happy. It’s more like fans of a sports team. If their star quarterback is winning – even if that means they’re personally doing worse – they’re on the winning team.
The false narrative of ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires’ is detrimental because it’s misleading in how we talk to and about them. I don’t remember who started that, but it’s dead wrong.
Well said. This is especially evident in places like Appalachia where people are demonstrably hurting and maintain an unwavering allegiance.
