Help the billionaires
- Thread starter Rastafarian
- Start date
DSA say: "Having a lot of money makes you fascist ... that's why we want control of all the money."
Even my libertarian friends understand this. Justice Roberts is a fvcking disaster.
so our leaders have to figure a way within income tax to identify income/gains of people over a certain level of weather and tax them on that income. I'm not a fan of a wealth tax/income tax hybrid.
And if we could come up with a way to do that, I doubt if many Americans would be against it.
Yeh, and its not hard. Its just that the billionaires will be furious, but that will be funny so I say we do it.
What is the proposal exactly that matches what Ned said? I haven't seen one that isn't a wealth tax.
If net worth > than $1B, then tax on ordinary income > X is Y% and tax on cap gains > A is B%? Also, no tax increase on anyone with a net worth <$1B? How is net worth established?
Net worth would be an aggregate of property and stocks or some combination like that.
you know, how we do it today when we calculate our own net worth.... its not rocket surgery.
Yea I get that. But how do you value non-public businesses for example? Or when do you mark highly volatile stocks? Will the IRS be combing through portfolios? LLCs? Do you appraise real estate each year?
And what about the other part of my question? I'm genuinely interested because this actually gets at what you and other dems seem to care about (billionaires), whereas other tax increase proposals absolutely do not (raising SS cap, raising taxes on people making $400K).
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How do we value non public businesses today?
volatile stocks? I'm sure we can figure that out by taking a mean over the year or some other statistical measurement. When you are talking about BILLIONS of dollars, this seems like painting the pinky toe on a giant.
The other part of your question: If net worth > than $1B, then tax on ordinary income > X is Y% and tax on cap gains > A is B%? Also, no tax increase on anyone with a net worth <$1B? How is net worth established?
I really couldn't grok (the actual use of the word, not the AI) this. Can you clean it up because it reads confusing with your use of greater than > , in some places. Idk can you please use seperate lines for statements I think its just not clicking for me the way you are portraying it.
repeating that I don't know how you value "income"...I guess you could count loans against assets as income, gains in stock prices as income (even though not realized) etc.
But one thing I can see is a multitude of lawsuits. We all know that no one single person will evaluate the "income" for every billionaire. There will be multiple people involved, each following a specific criteria. But we all know that not everyone sees everything the same way no matter the printed criteria. So I can see Musk suing because some item on his income was evaluated differently from Bezos or Zuckerberg...
In reality, it will be the same for taxing wealth...not everyone will be evaluated the same way, and that opens the door for lawsuits...and theses guys can afford the best lawyers...
So "tax the billionaires" sort of roles off the tongue when a politician uses the slogan to impress a crowd. But doing it based our tax code will not be easy if at all possible
Rephrased:
Confirming that we are not raising taxes on anyone with a net worth less than $1B, since billionaires are the target.
If so, then if someone's net worth is greater than $1B, we will implement new tax rates for those specific individuals. Those tax rates will need to kick in at certain levels. So the questions are, at what income and/or cap gains level do billionaire tax rates kick in, and what are those new tax rates?
We should flat tax net wealth over a billion. Or progressive tax . It doesn't matter either will suffice for debate purposes.
How do you tax wealth? Few have $1B+ sitting in cash. Should a billionaire be forced to sell ownership in the company he built and hand it over to the government? What if it's not publicly traded? How do you carve off pieces for the feds? What if the wealth is all tied up in illiquid assets?
Are you concerned about the slippery slope of wealth confiscation? What happens when the masses want more money (and they will)? Confiscate wealth from everyone with $100M? Then $10M? Then everyone gives a piece of their wealth to the government each year?
We have a progressive tax system. Families making $95K per year pay a mere 12% marginal rate while families in the top bracket pay a whopping 37%. Are you suggesting adding another tier? At what level and how much? I do think that is far more reasonable and practical than wealth confiscation.
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seems to me that if we tax wealth every year in order to fund transfer payments at some point we run out of it
I just don’t see how a wealth tax is practical or even right. Take the large numbers away and think about it. This is something someone earned, paid taxes on and is their’s. It doesn’t belong to anyone else. And we want the federal government to be able to forcibly take it? That’s a dangerous, slippery slope.
The original income tax only applied to between 1-3% of Americans. And now we all pay. Once we invent another category of taxation, you can bet that more and more and more people will be targeted by the federal government.
How do you tax wealth? You just do.
Whats so hard about this? Are you seriously going to throw up your hands in the made up scenario that a poor billionaire might have to sell stocks?
I don't think we need to worry about how they pay it, they can pay it.
I support a wealth tax over a certain threshold - maybe like $500m or something. I have no idea the best way to implement it that protects against the slippery slope effect of future congresses trying to lower it, though. I think a starting point would be to look at ways to tax individuals who don't receive an income, but rather borrow against assets to live off of.
idk, it's not my area of expertise, and personally I don't care about paying a little more in taxes if it means other less well-off people don't have to worry about going bankrupt if a medical emergency pops up.
idk, it's not my area of expertise, and personally I don't care about paying a little more in taxes if it means other less well-off people don't have to worry about going bankrupt if a medical emergency pops up.
it's not just the person selling the stock, other owners often see reductions in value when greater supply hit the marketplace.
well that's one thing I proposed..come up with a formula for "imputed" salary based on loans against assets and other Loopholes" used, and tax that.
I say again, there is no reason for someone to go bankrupt over a medical emergency...reinstitute "catastrophic" isurance
And you aren’t worried about this being a slippery slope? You are introducing an entirely new category of taxation.
When the income tax was introduced, it targeted only 1-3% of the population. Only 0.4% actually paid the tax. It started at 1% of income and only reached 7% as the top marginal rate. I’m sure it was sold at the time as, “you don’t need to worry about it, it only applies to those rich ********.“
Now the income tax targets everyone, though the lower 50% barely pay. And the top marginal rate is a whopping 37% plus FICA on top of income tax.
What’s to stop something similar with a wealth tax?
It's extremely difficult, and would lead to so much corruption and political backstabbing and infighting, it would make a Trump kingship look like a pure Greek democracy.
Yeah, no. We're not "ballparking" taxation. Market values, on the great majority of things that aren't nearly perfectly liquid, are estimates. Good luck taxing off estimates. It'll be endless litigation, endless corruption and backdealing, and a whole new world of asset ownership/management shenanigans.
It's a ridiculous concept to those who actually deal with asset valuation and business ownership/structuring.
There's a reason folks like Trump can get away with fluffing their asset holdings in Place X, and downplaying their asset holdings in Place Y. "I'm sure we can" by someone with no knowledge of the process isn't worth anything. This would be a practical disaster that would do far more harm than good.
It’s not hard at all. Gary Stevenson pointed out that the Bezos were able to quantify and divide their assets when they divorced.
Jeff Bezos effectively lost half his wealth. I’m sure he had to sell some stocks. He was one of the richest people in the world at the time. The markets didn’t crater and the economy didn’t collapse as a result.
As someone who conducts asset valuation for a living (as one aspect of what I do), and is/was a practical expert in business structuring/restructuring and taxation ... and someone who would be affected by a wealth tax, but is also more than willing to accept a higher level of taxation (despite s.hitty people trying to make "rich" people out to be villains), I can assure you that you're dead wrong. And I'm not interested in hearing your counterarguments.
The Bezos situation is not instructive ... asset valuation can be contentious or amiable, depending on the situation ... and there, it was quite straightforward, with the overwhelming majority of the assets being common ownership interest in a publicly traded company.
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You’re going to be affected by a billionaire wealth tax? According to Forbes, there are 989 billionaires in this country. I didn’t realize, until now, that you are one of them.
A slippery slope argument claims that a small first step will inevitably lead to a chain of related (usually negative) events without sufficient evidence for each step.
Very much so. I believe Trump got in twouble for doing exactly that. Lying to pump up or lower the value of his properties.
Assets that are taxed.
I understand what you are saying. should we then tax them on ... something else? I just can't believe I pay the same effective tax rates as these folks when you adjust for all taxes, sales, income etc.
Cool. Do you not think that legalizing federal wealth confiscation could lead to more people than just billionaires having their wealth taken by the government?
Those who have never accumulated wealth, and have no plans to do so in the future, are unconcerned about such trivial matters....
Only as it is earned or transferred. Now we are opening up a means for the government to simply take money sitting in accounts or assets. Very, very dangerous.
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