Submitted 2 weeks ago by bytesonbike@discuss.online to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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The oligarchs in the US are the utlimate power behind the destruction of our democracy. They have stolen the wealth from us for decades. And yet so many of our citizens defend them because they might be rich one day. Which they won’t. Because the ultrarich already there won’t let them.
Guillotines are long overdue.
We don’t wonder anything. If you were wondering, you never bothered to think about it for more than three minutes.
And your comment has what to do with mine?
There actually is an estate tax after death:
www.irs.gov/businesses/…/estate-tax
Right now it only kicks in after 15 million. A decade ago it was still 5 million. But it doubles to 30 million for a couple.
For the really wealthy people, they need to pay to obfuscate the rest of the money thru trusts and offshore banking, which they’d rather not to pay to do.
Which is why they’re still pushing to raise the cap every year.
They donate it all to charities…. Charities they set up with their relatives on the boards of trustees, who then get paid salaries from the charity’s endowment.
No they don’t. You cannot buy yourself what they have with charity money. That’s just the influence part.
“The rich pay nintey-"
“They can pay fucken 100 percent, I dont give a shit. You want to be a world pillar? Here you go.”
Ancap (ie, right wing) friend sent me this off shitter:
Unrealized gains tax for Gen-Z:
You buy a Pokémon card for $50.
Someone offers you $500 for it. You say no. You love that card. You’re keeping it.
The government says: “Cool, but that card is worth $500 now. You owe us $100 in taxes.” You: “…I didn’t sell it.”
Government: “Don’t care. Pay up.”
You don’t have $100 lying around. So you’re forced to sell the card you love just to pay a tax on money you never received.
Next month? That card drops back to $50.
Your card is gone. Your money is gone. And the government shrugs.
That’s a wealth tax on unrealized gains. They don’t pay you back the tax…
Now picture this.
Your mom calls you crying. She has to sell the house she raised you in. Not because she can’t afford it. She’s lived there 30 years. It’s paid off.
But some website says it’s worth more now and the government says she owes $15,000 she doesn’t have.
So she sells your childhood home. The kitchen where she made you breakfast. The doorframe where she marked your height every birthday.
Gone.
To pay a tax on money that was never real.
Now picture the opposite.
Your dad put everything into his small business. For 20 years he built it from nothing. One year the business is “valued” at $2 million on paper. He owes a massive tax bill. He empties his savings. Sells his truck. Borrows money. Pays it.
Next year the market crashes. His business is worth $200,000.
He lost everything to pay a tax on a number that doesn’t exist anymore.
Does the government give him his money back? No.
Does the government give him his truck back? No.
Does the government care? No.
They sold this idea as “taxing billionaires.” But billionaires have armies of lawyers, offshore accounts, and trusts. They’ll be fine.
You know who won’t be fine? Your mom. Your dad. Your neighbor with a small business. The farmer down the road who’s had the same land for four generations and now has to sell it because dirt got expensive.
You’re not taxing wealth. You’re taxing people for owning things.
It’s like getting a parking ticket for a car you might drive somewhere someday.
They want you to own nothing and be happy. To fund the fraud, waste and abuse of the welfare state they created.
There is enough money. More tax isn’t needed. It’s all a lie. But you’ve been gaslit into believing this is a rich vs poor debate.
I hope you understand what’s at stake.
I pretty much instantly shut that down by saying “THEN MAKE THE FUCKING LAW FORBID THE BILLIONAIRES FROM SIDE STEPPING IT! THAT IS THE PROBLEM! IT IS A RICH VS POOR DEBATE YOU IDIOT!!!”
People are idiots.
The ways this is idiotic:
There is currently no tax on unrealized gains. If there ever were, it wouldn’t be 20%. It would be something tiny like 1-2%. It’s a wealth tax. Wealth taxes are tiny compared to income taxes precisely because they’re taxing something you’re holding and will still have next year if nothing changes.
Why does it “drop back to $50”? OP said that the $500 value was because someone offered that much for it. Did that person no longer want to buy it? It’s true that sometimes the value of things is fluid, which can make wealth taxes hard. But a 90% drop in value over the course of a month? Let’s be realistic.
Yes, housing taxes are wealth taxes. Sometimes when the place you lived in appreciates enough, the property taxes go up a lot. So yes, sometimes people do have to move when their properties go up so much they can no longer afford the property taxes. But, when that happens they get to sell the place, and if the property taxes are so much that the person can no longer afford them, that means that the property is worth a fortune. The property tax is often 2% or below. So, if mom owes $15,000 in property taxes, that means her property is worth at least $750,000, probably actually more than $1M. Cha ching! She can buy a nice, smaller place now that she doesn’t need to raise kids, and use the rest to go on some nice vacations.
Yeah, it sucks if you have an emotional attachment to a place you can no longer afford. But, there are plenty of people who can’t afford to buy a house at all, who weren’t even allowed to mark their kids’ heights every birthday because they were renting. Wealth taxes are a way to even things out. Property taxes are a pretty shitty form of wealth taxes because they hit the middle class harder than the ultra rich, but people who don’t own property don’t pay property taxes, which is good.
Man, this guy can’t catch a break, all his relatives have everything crash 90% in value immediately after having to pay a tax bill they can’t afford, despite wealth taxes being tiny amounts.
In addition, most of the time wealth taxes have a threshold exactly for this kind of reason. If someone owns a $2m business in a place with wealth taxes, they may pay nothing because the first $5m is exempt.
Yes, sometimes wealth taxes are more painful to upper middle class or the moderately rich because they don’t have the armies of lawyers and accountants who can find the best strategy to minimize their taxes. But, the answer isn’t to scrap wealth taxes entirely. It’s to accept that even the moderately wealthy should pay more than people who own almost nothing, and to properly fund the tax authorities and financial crimes divisions of the cops so they can go after the ultra rich when they illegally avoid taxes.
If you got 500$ - 100$ in tax for the card and it drops back to 50$, you can just buy it back with 400$ you still have left…
And a wealth tax and inheritance tax usually have a cut before you even have to pay any tax. Got granny’s house worth 500k? No problem. Get a building complex worth millions? Pay your damn taxes. I’m sure the state will accept a payout over time if you can’t afford to pay it at once.
The Pokémon card example is ludicrous - aside from the fact that CCG cards are not “wealth”, or the fact that no one would offer $500 for a card that is only worth $50, a single buyer does not make a market or set the value. Stocks, the source of most outrageous wealth, by definition have a market value, and even the most frothy of assets don’t swing 10x in such a short period of time.
The mom calling about selling the childhood home is very real, in fact it already happens! Guess your friend is unfamiliar with property taxes. My home has tripled in value and the government appraised value went up by a smaller amount, and now I pay taxes. When my mortgage is fully paid off, I will still owe the local government taxes every year. All those “tax free” states lean on regressive taxes like sales tax and property taxes to avoid collecting progressive income taxes, so this problem is even worse in those states.
A while back I owned a small business, and because I didn’t pay myself in stock, I had to pay taxes every year based on how much my company profited. My business partner and I would do a distribution every year to pay those taxes. We paid more every year in taxes on our modest business than Tesla paid last year on $5.7B in income. Also, company “worth” for private businesses is based on appreciated assets and cash on hand… a business owner who “lost” 90% of the business value of a two decade old business in a year has much, much bigger problems than unrealized gains taxes.
Middle class people are already paying wealth taxes. Mutual funds are taxed on unrealized gains all the time, albeit at capital gains rates (because we value capital more than labor). Property taxes are paid on the biggest source of wealth most people own. Even poor people are paying annual taxes or fees on their cars.
I agree, your friend is a moron, but I think most people knew that the second they saw “ancap”.
Property taxes are regressive, but having state income taxes doesn’t preclude them, the states just spend the extra money. Here some cities have income taxes, the state, and the feds. And counties do property taxes through the township levels. The state will spend every penny they can get their grasping hands on, currently for pet projects of lawmakers and tax breaks and incentives and money spent to improve locations to lure big business to set up here.
While the small business both parties pretend to care about like yourself pay through the nose, that money is taken from us and handed to the richest companies in the world to set up here without paying those same taxes.
It’s all about leverage, and alone we have none. It’s never been more clear we need to organize, on our own forums, around what we agree on, no matter what we disagree on. On existing social media we are simply turned against each other on issues, oh that person from the other side that rejected their party and came over to our side? They once said this and still say that so fuck them they aren’t pure, even as the people making those arguments originally are the biggest pieces of shit in the world.
Social media is rigged, we need our own forums set up to not be rigged, to not be hooked by government and big business, and providing clear rules enforced fairly. Federated sites on general forums allowing people to cooperate publicly and privately as they see fit, and move between social medias on the same account. Where violations can be appealed all the way to a jury trial of members to prevent the rich, government, and moderators perverting it or abusing their power.
Would making the law kick in after a certain amount of net worth be the answer in that situation?
It’s almost like we have that exact system in place for income.
Not likely. First of all, the net worth numbers you see for these ultra-wealthy people are all educated guesses. To actually legally impose anything based on total net worth, you need to actually audit net worth and get a real figure. The resources it would take to do this are very unlikely to yield more tax revenue than they cost, especially because there is so much one can possess whose value is pretty much completely arbitrary (the high-end artwork, etc.).
It’s actually all-but-certain it’d be a net loss of tax revenue. There is a reason that every time such a policy targeting only the wealthiest is put into place (it’s been tried numerous times over the years in a bunch of European countries), it’s gotten rid of soon thereafter, or ‘dialed down’ to be just another ‘mundane’ tax that falls primarily into the lap of the middle class.
Start taxing 20% from $1B+ and I think 99.999999% of us are fine.
Historically, taxing the ultra-rich at 90% or 95% has not stopped them from staying rich, and it also helped everyone else get more social services.
A wealth tax wouldn’t apply to normal people below an obscene threshold. And you wouldn’t tax a primary residence at all, as is already the case with our tax code on near every score. You wouldn’t tax a baseball card collection.
But if a person put a bunch of paypal stock into an IRA account, and it turned into 5 billion dollars later, you would find a way to tax most all of that. If bezos’ worth increased by billions, then a portion above an obscene level would be taxed, often exempting the first so much then graduating higher levels, as is customary in taxation here.
You are excusing the super rich from taxes by associating it with hypothetical unfair taxations against normal people for smaller amounts. Which is the same way they got rid of the estate tax, by lying about who paid the estate tax, claiming family farms and small business paid it, when it was only obscenely rich people that paid it.
Now, no one pays it. An heiress just inherited 200 million on her 19th birthday or something, not the entire estate just a piece of it, without paying a dime in tax, thanks to the dishonest arguments mirroring the ones you made on this in the first half of your piece at least.
Bezos paid 600 dollars in 2020, a year his net worth skyrocketed, and where he spent an incredible amount of money he got without getting a paycheck. He paid less in taxes than we do, not just per capita, total. He claimed the child tax credit. When your net worth increases by millions above millions, it needs to be taxed, whether it’s when they borrow against the value of that which is where they now realize much of their income that is tax free now, or whether it’s regardless of it being realized.
If the value they were taxed on an increased price of an asset fell later, they would be able to subtract that back 3 years and forward ten years to offset other taxable income, that’s the way it’s already set up, itself quite unfair as working people get no such consideration to only pay taxes on profits, which would be akin to only paying taxes on wages after paying all of your core bills.
In 1950, the majority of taxes, like 90 percent, came from businesses, now 90 percent is ripped from working people, and the richer they are, the less they pay above a certain threshold, something has to change.
The whole reason the right wants to abolish the “welfare state” is to have a pipeline of poor and hungry children to sell as sex slaves.
Change my mind.
Yeah. My parents moved into the country because their house value got too high and they were being taxed to death because of all the people that moved into my hometown making property values skyrocket.
Then other people started moving into the area, and now the value of their place has skyrocketed, and they’re gonna have to sell again because they’re being taxed to death because other people moved into the area.
There’s this massive movement of retirement people from place to place because every time they move somewhere to reduce their tax burden the values go up again.
I’m 100% for capping the taxable value of land for primary homes based on the value at the time of purchase plus inflation. The whole idea of a homestead is to improve land, and
“Boo Hoo, my assets keep going up in value so much that I keep having to cash out!”
The vast majority of states have some level of control on the increase in property taxes. Generally through a cap on appreciation, cap on tax increase, or both.
One word: Land value tax.
Every time I see a post like this I am disappointed that NO ONE mentions Henry George.
People, please, go educate yourself. Taxes were solved before ww1.
Technically three words.
I’m german speaking. So for me, this is one word ;)
Why’s that? You stated your opinion knowing that many people are ignorant of it, but failed to back it up. Why should we research your idea when we have ideas of our own? Don’t suggest we’re ignorant if you’re not willing to take the first step in educating us. Your contempt feels good but doesn’t solve any problems. Ciao
I feel you and I’m glad you asked. The goal of my comment is to invoke interest so one can go down the rabbithole on ones own terms. This has a much more sustainable effect than just serving information on a boilerplate nobody asked for. Much like a catchy title/thumbnail on a yt video generates clicks, but the actual information does not.
There are a lot of ressources about LVT out there including some educational videos in an entertainning way. Pick your own posion: www.youtube.com/results?search_query=georgism
My Standpoint: Our present tax system is bad (almost worldwide): Tax based on value generated (like income, sales and import taxes) costs society a lot (real costs but also opportunity costs) while simultaniously not solving a lot of todays issues (f.e. old money, zone planning / car centric design, pollution, etc.). Land Value Tax (or more precicely: Ressource Tax) solves this by getting rid of the penalty for being productive or creating value while simultaniously taxing those being exponantionally wasteful with ressources and/or pollute.
With LVT, there is now a penalty free incentive to increase profits and/or efficiency. On the other hand, if you consume and/or occupy ressources like land, oil or air pollution, you’ll have to pay tax for that. The sum of the tax would be similar or higher than todays sum and would finance all government spending including a citizens dividend which could be interpreted today as unconditional basic income which would provide for basic human needs.
Georgism is PRO Economy and PRO Humanity. Win Win. Regardless of your political flavor, you should be in favor 😏
Winners: Society, everyone from poor to rich, entrepreneurs Losers: old money, polluters, unrighteous beneficiaries of today’s flawed legal situation
Georgism is an ideology.
They think the LVT will solve all social problems ever. That’s the premise of the book he wrote about it.
This doesn’t make any sense. How are the loans getting paid back?
This is the process, extremely simplified:
Obviously, there is more to it than this. For example, this does not account for interest in the loan, or diversification of investments, or ability to hire accountants to maximize on the process.
Your kids inherit the stock at its current value and immediately sell $10M worth to pay off original loan
And the bank says “um, what about the rest?” In the 1970s and early 80s the inflation rate was, at times, above 10%, so your loan’s interest rate would have been above that. But say on average the loan’s interest rate was 5% per year over 30 years… the bank isn’t going to be content for just the original $10M.
You think they’re giving out low rate 30-50 year rolling personal loans in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars range? This I find hard to believe. The premise makes sense, but I don’t think these loans usually exist.
…yale.edu/…/buy-borrow-die-options-reforming-tax-…
It’s actually a real thing.
Since taxes are paid when an asset is sold, not when it goes up in value, your net worth goes up with no tax liability change. When you die, the purchase price for tax purposes resets. Now the inheritor sells the assets. Since the sale price is essentially the same as the taxation price, there’s no taxes.
You’re borrowing today’s money against tomorrow’s value and taking the difference out of your death messing with taxes to free up the value.
From a financial perspective the time horizon for return doesn’t matter, only that the return is balanced against the time. From that perspective, the people giving the loan have no reason to really care since it makes them look good and they’ll at least not be working there when and if it goes wrong.
They get a painting worth 10K, get a loan for that, then get it appraised for 30K, get a loan on that from somewhere else and pay off the other one. That’s one idea.
The second is they like assets that provide passive income and appreciate. You’ll find a lot get into land as well and rental units.
For the individual wealthy, they aren’t. Some loans might get paid off by taking another loan, but the goal is to take the loan to the grave. The loan would get paid after death because then the estate can sell the stocks without paying any capital gains tax.
Let’s say you buy 1 million worth of stocks. The day before you die that stock is worth 51 million. If you cash out that stock you’re paying capital gains tax on 50 million. Let’s say the capital gains tax is 20% which means you’d pay 10 mil in taxes. So you get 41 million from the sale
But if you die and that stock goes to the estate they haven’t gained any capital from the stock so when they sell it they pay no tax on it. The estate then sells the stock tax free to pay off whatever debt there was and the rest of the stock goes to the inheritors who can effectively continue doing the same thing.
Basically it’s all just tax evasion for the ultrawealthy. Except it’s legal so technically it’s not tax evasion.
Look, the rich people wrote the laws. You think they didn’t leave loopholes for themselves? … Tax law doesn’t have to make sense.
Since the 1970s governments been continually printing more money. This means that if you can get a low enough interest loan (i.e. by having a ton of money already so that you’re low risk), the money will devalue fastet than interest accrues. You just keep doing that, and you can invest it too.
the stocks pay dividends,
In France, the ministry of Economics just announced that 13000 millionaires did not pay income tax in 2025 … and our social security (health insurance, jobless minimun income, etc) was founded on the principle of taxing the wealthy. So they (liberals) now say that social security is not working as intended and the state should delegate these things to “for profit” organizations … for “efficiency”
Henry Ford said, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
This is why we need a wealth tax.
Buy borrow die is a very real economic strategy.
Acquire assets, never sell them, use them as collateral for bank loans, use that capital as collateral for further bank loans. Never sell, no capital gains tax.
Bank loans aren’t considered income therefore not subject to being taxed.
Die rich, your kids inherit the money Scott free.
Don’t the unpaid loans get collected from the estate upon death, and the inheritors get the difference?
I was being concise so as to keep the comment short. But I recommend you look into it. It’s a very real thing and it’s completely legal.
Don’t tax the rich. Take more extreme measures.
Join your local communist party and join the revolution to overthrow these fucks and seize their fortune by force.
Yeah because Communism worked so well for Russia, China, North Korea, etc. Communism is NEVER the answer, since it will ALWAYS get abused.
If I burn your house down, is that evidence your house “didn’t work” and should never have been built in the first place?
Apparently worked better than the alternative . . .
Saying communism isn’t the answer since it will get abused, when your alternative is capitalism, is like saying dating someone in recovery is a bad idea, and that’s why you only look for abusive people who are currently drunk.
Just like how capitalism works so well for the U.S. and Canada and many other countries?
Don’t you see what’s happening around you? I live in Hochelaga, a borough of Montreal, Canada. There are people sleeping in tents in all the parks around my home. There are literal encampments with several people living together. They’re freezing to death in the winter and dying of heatstroke in the summer. They’re starving. They’re sick. They can’t afford rent after getting kicked out of their apartments because some rich property baron bought their apartment bloc to flip it. Housing has become a commodity for investment instead of a human right. Same with food. Food banks can’t keep up with the surging demand. People are unable to feed themselves because of food inflation. Grocery stores are stocked to the brim, but people are starving because they can’t afford it. Our public healthcare system is being gutted and replaced with private clinics and private care that are out of reach for the vast majority of people. And in the U.S. it’s even worse! People have to live with preventable health problems, wounds, diseases and die because health care is unaffordable. Even education is out of reach in the U.S. because of how ridiculously expensive it is. How well is it going for us in a capitalist world? Not good at all.
And you’re saying it didn’t work well for the Soviet Union and China? The Soviet Union initiated the space race. They’ve kept pace with the rest of the world in terms of technology and innovation. They were one of the most educated people on earth. Everyone was housed and fed and schooled and received the medical care they needed. And China? I’d say it’s working pretty fucking well for the world’s current superpower. They’re leading the world in economy, technology, productivity, progress, and believe it or not, even environmentally. No other nation has planted as much trees as they did or made as much progress in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions as China did. They’re putting every other countries to shame.
And forget North Korea. That’s not communism.
This is u ironically why the rich should support a wealth tax.
Ok, but how about something instead of communism, because that never works.
Who told you that it never works? … Checks notes … the capitalists did.
Capitalism doesn’t work. And sadly capitalism never allowed communism to work. Because the greed of the few outweighed the needs of he many.
That’s so far because either a elite group gets in power and turns it into feudalism again, or the us intervenes because communism shall not work.
We didn’t throw away democracy just because the french revolution failed at first.
A permanent utopia free from geopolitical influence has yet to be established under any system of government, therefore no government has ever worked.
Looking at Vietnam… Seems to work great when the imperialists fall to crush you.
Folks, please don’t polarize because some rando on social media tells you to. We live in an increasingly polarizing world. I’m with you on taxing the rich and holding them accountable and distributing incomes more fairly again but PLEASE know you can be centrist AND make the change you want to see. Following identity politics in the far right or far left part of the spectrum isn’t the answer but mobilizing peope from the entire spectrum to stand up and build a resistance TOGETHER is. Don’t cut out that many people from your movements because then you’re only fewer. You lack persuasion in numbers, and for these things we need masses. Maybe I may remember you of the “let them eat cake” lady. Different times of course but you get my point
Centrism is the enabler of fascism.
“If we tax billionaires they’ll leave!” in a box? lol
Hopefully. A wooden box. The kind that gets buried 6 feet under.
Coincidentally, I saw an article entitled “Buy, Borrow, Die”. If you don’t need to have a salary paying job (so not applicable to almost everyone I know or have ever met), you buy an asset let it grow, refinance it (borrowings grow), spend the money you borrowed (tax free) some for more assets, some for pleasure. Rinse and repeat until you die with a shitload of debt that then gets wiped out.
this is also pretty good vulnerability, should people start to think at somepoint that maybe billionaires shouldnt have all the wealth in the world. I wonder how the ones who have loaned them money would feel if the asset they have loaned the money for would just… go away.
Oh was that why they threw the tomato sauce on that one painting? Now it all makes sense
Tax portfolio loans. That’s pretty much it. Sure, there will need to be some moving parts beyond that, but basically if you treat a loan as an income rather than something like a primary residence purchase, it gets taxed.
I think the ‘unrealized assets’ should be taxed as ‘realized’ if they are used as collateral. Yes, it would affect the reverse mortgages and such, or home equity loans, but fuck it, I’d take those relatively small pains against the massive societal gains.
Reverse Mortgages are usually predatory anyway, so more scrutiny and regulation isn’t a bad thing.
Yes, this. Tax collateral as advance on capital gains and the whole incentive to dodge taxes with loans go away
You could make exceptions for loans taken to improve the same asset (home improvement loans) but you’d have to pass strict audits to get the exception approved
I don’t know what the financial consequences would be. Taxing unrealized assets would also have to have limits because so many retirement funds and the like are unrealized gains, we don’t want to hurt people’s ability to retire. That’s why putting a tax on trying to sidestep paying capital gains makes more sense. We’re not going to figure out how that all works here today. People won’t sit on unrealized gains, they’re going to have to use them in some fashion even if just as collateral, and we need to tax whatever workarounds they use to make those funds work for them.
they have tax accountants, legal advisors plus they squirrel away money to foreign banks, like swiss, deustche bank.
The way wealth is structured definitely shapes how opportunity flows. It’s worth having thoughtful conversations about tax policy and fairness without turning it into pure outrage—systems matter.
I used to work in fair tax policy. It exists.
Everyone hates it. That’s all I ever learned from years of work on the issue. Even the people who would benefit from it, hate it.
“Ferengi workers don’t want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters.” – Rom, DS9, S4E16
Oh no, AI on Lemmy. It’s joever :(
If all the assets are secured by loans, then they inherit fuck all. They don’t magically not owe loans or pay interest.
I’m not even close to the type of person where this strategy is an option, but the magic is in the stepped-up basis from what I understand.
Let’s say an asset is purchased for $1 million, held until it’s worth $10 million, and used to secure a $5 million loan. If you sell the asset, you owe taxes on the $9 million capital gain. If you die, the asset’s value “steps up” to the new baseline of $10 million. Your heir could then sell it with no capital gains tax, and pay off the loan and pocket the rest. If they hold onto the asset, and it appreciates to $11 million, they would only owe taxes on the gain of $1 million, not $10 million.
The whole scheme makes sense when it’s applied to a random farmer inheriting land from his parents: you dont want to force him to sell the land to pay capital gains. It makes a lot less sense when it’s someone inheriting stocks worth the GDP of a country.
For the ultra wealthy, the value of their assets goes up faster than the interest rate of the loan.
And they benefit the most from taxes too.
Public education gives me better opportunities.
Public education gives them thousands of literate employees who can do basic math, think logically, use technology, and learn anything new.
This applies to everything from building roads to government scholarships and health programs. The military too.
The percentage of sociopaths involved with creating a society should never be greater than zero.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Yep.
Saw a vid about doing that recently. www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsDsDqIxgfg
And when I searched for that again just now, saw there are dozens of others too, about “borrow until you die” and similar. “Tax is for the poor” they say.
So much for progressive tax system.
The whole system (not just the tax system) is broken by design.
Wealth and Asset Taxes now!
They also have bank accounts here and in the Cayman Islands
They set up LLCs in Nevis, a tiny island nation that doesn’t disclose who owns what business. The filthy rich use these mailbox businesses to buy real estate, and launder money. None of it can be traced back to them.
They also inexplicably all have grand pianos.
The devs never patched the infinite money glitch.
Isnt this monetary policy rather than taxes?
If we didnt make borrowing so cheap then it wouldnt be cheaper to borrow to avoid taxes.
Might be a silly question –
Why not get taxed by selling it once and for all instead of paying interest on the loan against it for years.
In the long run won’t interest surpass the one time tax?
Also assuming they invest the surplus after the sale, it should be the cheaper option.
Yachts and mansions are depreciating assets. You aren’t borrowing against those and then passing them along as an inheritance.
Inheritance is wealth centralizing and anti democratic without severe restrictions
Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Yup, search for “Buy borrow die” and there are various articles about the technique.
damnedfurry@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is basically urban legend at this point; “buy borrow die” is a tiny piece of the ultra-wealthy’s financial strategy, at least when it comes to the “borrow” part, which is what everyone’s focused on:
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
What’s confusing to me is that there must be a reason they’re borrowing. When you borrow, you have to pay interest. If you’re someone who has a lot of money, why would you pay someone to lend you money? I guess the only thing that makes sense is that they think that whatever makes them rich, say Amazon shares or something, will go up at a rate that beats the interest rate they have to pay for the loan. OTOH, I guess they’re not so sure of that that they borrow in order to buy even more Amazon shares.
I assume this means “not to sell all of their appreciated assets”, because they do spend a lot of money and it has to come from somewhere.
Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Neat doc, thanks for linking. I find this part very sensible in light of what you brought up
That makes sense… I mean once you’re somehow generating millions or more every year in income, no need to borrow at all really. It’s making it to that upper tier of income vs. expenses that few reach.
That’s the key thing.