damnedfurry
@damnedfurry@lemmy.world
- Comment on App development 5 days ago:
There was an attempt
- Comment on App development 5 days ago:
women struggling in the office when they did not put on makeup that specific day, how the behavior of random strangers changed etc.
It’s simply the difference that’s being noticed, and no one’s really at fault for that, on either side. Any woman who never wears makeup is also never going to get the same ‘are you sick?’ kind of reactions on any given day she doesn’t wear makeup to work.
- Comment on App development 5 days ago:
Same, I’m really grateful she has no interest/desire to wear makeup. It was also nice to know what her face looked like from day 1, which is what this app is meant to facilitate.
The more I think about it, the stranger the notion of ‘gatekeeping her real face’ behind a full-on relationship sounds to me, lol.
P.S. lol, I just remembered reading an old ‘hack’ for this years and years ago: make a water park your first outing together.
- Comment on Powerful 1 week ago:
Uh, women graduate college at a rate much higher than men in the US, this is total bullshit, lol.
- Comment on Powerful 1 week ago:
Is the point meant to be that women don’t build off of their previous work as much as men? lol
Powerful This “science meme” needs more science and less meme, imo, lol
- Comment on The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax 1 week ago:
are there even any counterexamples?
Actually, there are a large number of billionaires whose primary assets are literally property.
forbes.com/…/the-richest-real-estate-billionaires…
I had hoped the point would be pretty obvious. Most people’s homes represent a significant part of their net worth, often a majority of their assets. The unrealized gains on that are taxed.
But the real question is, do you think they should be? 'Cause I’m with you if you say no. Unrealized gains should not be taxed at all, it makes no sense.
- Comment on The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax 1 week ago:
He does take an income ($100k, very modest compared to others even in the same company: …yahoo.com/…/why-warren-buffett-only-gets-1747309… ).
And why shouldn’t he continue to own things that are becoming more valuable over time, exactly?
- Comment on The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax 1 week ago:
- Property taxes are not levied federally, but on the state level
- Buffett pays property tax too
Not sure what point you were trying to make here, lol. There is no type of unrealized gain that “normal people” are taxed on (federally or otherwise), but Buffett isn’t.
- Comment on The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax 1 week ago:
My “true tax rate” is a low single digit number too, if you measure it the same way, and I make ~$50k a year.
It’s extremely disingenuous to talk about taxes paid as a percentage of income, and as a percentage of total wealth/net worth, in the same breath.
It’s also extremely disingenuous to say someone is ‘avoiding tax’ by not paying tax on their unrealized gains in net worth. He doesn’t OWE any tax on that. NOBODY in the US does.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
- The wealthiest’s wealth is all invested in the economy, literally the opposite of “hoarding”.
- “The lower rates are gamed to increase wealth disparity” is false–they are that way to encourage entrepreneurship and the like, the things that keep the economy strong. The fact that those who create the things that strengthen the economy become wealthy faster than those who don’t is a feature, not a bug. A rising tide lifts all ships. And make no mistake, one’s assets appreciating in value takes nothing away from those who haven’t invested–the latter group’s level of wealth is not affected by the former’s. In other words, the wage my job pays me does not change based on how wealthy other people’s assets are, from the billionaires, down to even a neighbor whose house has appreciated in value.
Wealth disparity is not inherently a bad thing–a century ago, the ‘gap’ was much smaller, as was the number of billionaires, but the average person’s wealth was also MUCH lower.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
Do the “actual workers” also pay up if the business suffers losses, then?
Can’t have it both ways.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
I don’t care how illiquid your wealth is, if it’s over $10B you’re just hoarding it and it’s doing fuck all for the economy.
That wealth is primarily invested in businesses that function within the economy, so “doing fuck all for the economy” is literally a lie, and this act is literally the opposite of “hoarding”.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
Genius move, now there is less tax revenue than ever. A solution that literally fixed nothing, and made the problem it was meant to solve, worse. Standard fare for ideologues who pretend to love the poor but actually only hate the rich.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
they clearly have access to some kind of money to pay for their extravagant lifestyle
They borrow money, and then invest it wisely, such that it grows faster than the interest rate of the loan, plus whatever the inflation rate is. If you do that well enough, then you have enough ‘margin’ remaining for the ‘extravagant lifestyle’ stuff, while still being able to pay back the loan.
There’s nothing really nefarious going on in this process. There is a risk being taken that the stuff the funds are invested in do indeed increase in value at a percentage rate higher than the interest rate. Lenders aren’t in the business of hemorrhaging free money to anyone–they are getting repaid, or else they wouldn’t be lending in the first place.
Putting your wages in a retirement index fund is essentially the same overall process (you’re also betting on the index fund, over the long term, growing faster than the rate of inflation), just at a lower scale.
There has to be some fair way of taxing that wealth the way income is taxed.
If you buy something for $5 and it becomes worth $100 without you doing anything (e.g. you buy a rookie baseball card, then the player has an amazing season or something, highly increasing demand for your card), wealth was created. Your net worth went up $95. Should you owe any of that $95 to the government, though? I mean, the $5 you spent to buy the card in the first place is income that was already taxed, in the paycheck of the job that paid it to you.
The thing that makes it very hard for a “fair wealth tax” to exist, is the fact that until you sell your asset(s) to someone else, their ‘worth’ is only hypothetical. If that was the last $5 you had that you spent on that card (silly example, I know, but just for the sake of argument), and now there was a wealth tax you had to pay, you would have no way of paying it without losing the card. The notion of having to sell off stuff you own to pay taxes assessed based on the estimated value of said stuff, is what makes it unfair, I’d say.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
You have to pay loans back. Do you think lenders are in the business of handing out free money? They lend because they get a return–if they didn’t, there would be literally zero motivation to lend.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
The French Revolution happened because people were literally starving to death in the streets. In the present-day US (at least), the poor are much, much more likely to be obese than hungry, let alone starving.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for it.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
then that’s for the workers to decide on. If 51% of the workforce agrees, thats the decision!
But the vast majority of workers don’t have the slightest idea how to run a business effectively. A very large proportion of them mismanage their own finances, let alone a larger responsibility like that.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
Most of the wealthy in the US don’t keep any significant part of their wealth in land.
This is really key. If it was 100 years ago, this would make more sense, but the vast majority of measured wealth created in the world today is in intangible assets, like stock prices.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
I agree a wealth tax is difficult to implement, but that alone is not a reason to dismiss the idea.
What about the fact that it’s been tried and failed a ton of times already in a bunch of countries? That’s a pretty good reason, I think.
In the only countries that still have a ‘wealth tax’, the thresholds are so broad that they are primarily a burden of the middle and lower classes, making it effectively no different than a more conventional/mundane tax, versus what everyone talking about a “wealth tax” in these kinds of discussions invariably expects; namely, a tax that only/primarily targets the wealthiest.
Before the income tax was implemented, there were promises it’d only be aimed at the rich, too.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
We really need to both make capital gains equally taxed to earned income
The capital gains tax isn’t lower than income tax just because. There are very specific reasons:
(TL;DR: a low capital gains rate has historically raised more in tax revenue)
The justification for a lower tax rate on capital gains relative to ordinary income is threefold: it is not indexed for inflation, it is a double tax, and it encourages present consumption over future consumption.
First, the tax is not adjusted for inflation, so any appreciation of assets is taxed at the nominal instead of the real value. This means investors must pay tax not only on the real return but also on the inflation created by the Federal Reserve.
Second, the capital gains tax is merely part of a long line of federal taxation of the same dollar of income. Wages are first taxed by payroll and personal income taxes, then again by the corporate income tax if one chooses to invest in corporate equities, and then again when those investments pay off in the form of dividends and capital gains. This puts corporations at a disadvantage relative to pass through business entities, whose owners pay personal income tax on distributed profits, instead of taxes on corporate income, capital gains, and dividends. One way corporations mitigate this excessive taxation is through debt rather than equity financing, since interest is deductible. This creates perverse incentives to over leverage, contributing to the boom and bust cycle.
Finally, a capital gains tax, like nearly all of the federal tax code, is a tax on future consumption. Future personal consumption, in the form of savings, is taxed, while present consumption is not. By favoring present over future consumption, savings are discouraged, which decreases future available capital and lowers long term growth.
Not only has a low capital gains tax rate worked to encourage savings and increase economic growth, a low capital gains rate has historically raised more in tax revenue.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
taxes should be sold as a patriotic act
I’m pretty sure that used to be exactly the case, actually. I remember seeing an old anti-Nazi cartoon as a kid, where being “for taxes” was painted as the patriotic good, versus “the X’s” (nice semi-rhyme I guess, lol), which I’m pretty sure was just a ‘nickname’ for the swastika.
- Comment on But how would they be able to live on that? 2 months ago:
any money over $1 billion should be taxed.
The reason it’s not taxed is because it isn’t money. Net worth is a price tag, not an amount of dollars.
Bezos’s net worth dropped by $57 billion in 2022. Do the rest of us owe money to him as a result? If not, then why does he owe us when his net worth goes up?
You can’t have it both ways.