this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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This is misinformation, because it paints a picture of the rich being hard done by.
The bottom 50% pays an actual tax rate that is a higher percentage of their earnings than the top 50%. The richer you are, the more opportunity you have to reduce your tax burden. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-much-poor-actually-pay-taxes-probably-think
Your own numbers are an indicator of massive income disparity.
I think the tax system in the USA is designed to reward people who form corporations and then get people employed. People who are employed don't have as much time to work on reforming institutions, so giving a tax break for employing people makes powerful people's lives easier. In order to keep this process revenue neutral, earned income is taxed instead of taxing business as much. After extracting money from people's labor (since labor is clearly necessary in order to create wealth), the remainder of budget needs is made up from whatever resources are easily available (which is currently the assets of rich people, since they have been given a lot of money to get people employed).
Yeah dude. The value of these corporations in inflated or neutral at best. Corporations pop up that are solely created to shelter or exploit to expand wealth.
It's not actually higher:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/
Top 1% pay 25.9% of their income to taxes, bottom 50% pay 3.3%
That doesn't take into account non federal tax.
https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/
This says it more explicitly.
Also, reported income is not the same for regular people and the top 1%. Tax evasion techniques makes it seem as if they have way less income than they really have.
EDIT: I do realize some of this could be incorporated into the statement of your quote above.
Yeah dude it's all a game :/
Can I pay my rent with unrealized capital gains?
@iopq Not you.. but yes it's possible and generally it creates financial bubbles. Basically using your capital as collateral on your mortgage. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpV1FS-gRZw (4:50)
But then I'd have to take out loans to pay my taxes which is absurd. I'll have to pay taxes on money that I don't physically have
@iopq You asked about rent, not taxes. They actually avoid taxes in this way. And yes, using money they don't physically have is exactly the source of all financial bubbles.
I'm saying you can't pay with paper money, you must pay with real money for everything.
I'm not against considering loans against unrealized assets as realization (with stepped up basis) since the person taking out said loan can use it to pay said tax.
People do this exact thing all the time. Taking on debts to keep cashflow or avoid taxes is normal.
If you are just sitting on unproductive assets instead of realising their value in some way, you are doing the wrong thing.
You should be able to gain revenue from the asset or it wouldn't have appreciating value.
All your comments don't make sense, it's like you just want to take from the economy without giving anything back.
I forgot the most obvious example:
If you bought a house for $200,000 and when you retire it's worth $1,000,000 the government shouldn't demand you pay a percentage of your "gain" for the rest of your life or until you are forced to sell it.
Why not
Taxes bad?
You are saying you want to tax retired people with no income just because they have a place to live in. Should we kick them out for nonpayment of said taxes too? Because that's what would happen. It happens in states with property taxes, but now you want to take it national.
This is the problem with leftists. This message would be an extremely bad electoral platform.
Zero cashflow retirees are not a thing.
ALL states have property tax.
You don't know what you are talking about if you don't understand how taxes are offset and credited. You are just whining about not wanting to participate in society.
Taxes pay for things, go get educated.
They have social security and some of them have savings. My mom is planning to retire in West Virginia and she's already planning on selling her current residence to build a house there. She chose a low property tax state on purpose.
At this point she would only receive social security and start to go through her savings to live. You want to start charging her federal taxes the moment her property is worth $1 more than what she bought it for, even though she's on fixed income.
Yup. And then credit it against standard deduction rates so that 🤡s owning multiple unoccupied homes pay real amounts while your grandmother pays pennies
Like a normal tax system, you doink
She owns one home now and one plot of land. She doesn't own multiple unoccupied homes. She's also my mother, not my grandmother
Are you a bot or something?
Please answer in ASCII semaphore or French if you don't know semaphore.
I don't know French, but here:
O O O
Close enough?
Let's say I give $100,000 to a friend that starts a start-up. You claim after some years that investment is worth $1,000,000 and want me to pay $150,000 tax
I take out a loan for $150,000 because the startup didn't make any profit. The startup goes bust. I now have a $100,000 loss and I paid $150,000 in taxes. Thankfully I can write $3000 off on my taxes every year until I die!
If the startup made no profit it would never be worth 1000000. You would only have a capital gain if value was realizable.
If you never made a dime from your initial 100000 investment you would sell off the asset at that point instead of paying taxes.
If you were too dumb to sell parts of your assets, and instead chose to be cash negative or fail to pay your taxes, you kind of deserve to lose everything because you were too stubborn to receive advice from anybody.
Amazon had its first profitable year in 2003. It was worth 21 billion dollars.
Yes, but how much cashflow did it have, and how much in dividends did the individual stakeholders receive.
It never didn't pay it's taxes afaik
Edit: I'm fact checking myself, Amazon's strategy is reinvesting all profits to support further growth. They were never in a position like the other poster is describing.
There were companies that didn't survive the dot com crash despite being worth billions. Amazon is a company you would recognize, even though a better company is pets.com
If you bought their stock you would be very rich for a very short while until it went bankrupt
https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/revenues_annual
For reference
Did I say zero revenue? I said didn't make a profit. Lots of companies made money, but couldn't make more money than they spent. You can easily have an investment that is valued high that you can't cash out
Let's say you bought some stock now, at the end of the year it's worth $1,000,000 and you get charged $150,000 in April. Big problem, the brokerages stopped allowing you to sell the stock and it crashed down, so now your GameStop stock is worth $100,000
How do you pay?
You don't pay... This is a solved problem, wealth gain/loss would work the same way as capital gain/loss
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individuals/topics/about-your-tax-return/tax-return/completing-a-tax-return/personal-income/line-12700-capital-gains/capital-losses-deductions/you-use-a-capital-loss.html
It feels like people that don't like this don't actually know how to whole system is supposed to work.
Canada?!