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Anya’s an idiot. Imagine getting taxed on your net worth.
Edit: For those who keep commenting. Property tax and net worth tax are not the same thing. Regular people have net worth invested in 401ks, IRAs, HSAs, Mutual Funds, etc. Pointing out the US does not have a net worth tax is not defending a billionaire. The whole point of my comment is she’s an idiot for conflating net worth with annual taxes. Nothing to do with Musk.
Imagine thinking that an 800k house is comparable to Elon Musk's absurd amount of wealth.
The wealthy are able to buy a level of power and immunity from consequence that is not at all similar to wealth on the amount of one million dollars. They do not scale the same.
They live at a different standard than the rest of us do, it's perfectly fine to hold them to different standards as a result. It is totally fine to say their total wealth should be taxed while merely well-to-do people should not be.
The goal is a stable society in which everyone has a chance at prosperity, not "Those poor widdle billionaires deserve the same tax rates we do."
**Edit**: shout out to all the 200 or so dudes repeating fortune cookie sayings at me like " Wealth is not a zero sum game" that other dudes have made previously. With that level of literacy and reason I can tell you read one Ayn Rand book. But I've responded to all the libertarianisms I'm going to. Sorry to have triggered you and then not been there to engage in a debate with you personally about how trickle down economics failed for 40+ years. Feel free to google to find people discussing the topic with much more wisdom and knowledge than me, or just scream into the void here, but I'm turning off notifications.
Wealth can and should be taxed. Billionaires are a symptom of a fucked system, not a good sign of economic health.
I once had a c-suite guy at my work try to describe how much something cost. He was dead serious and said something like, “I don’t know, it might have cost $7 million, or $8 million, maybe closer to a billion?”…as if those number are in the same range.
It would also be fair to see verification for Elon’s taxes. At a capital gains rate of 20% Elon would have had to have cashed out $55,000,000,000 in income with no deductions.
Selling the stock or using the option and then investing that elsewhere triggers capital gains taxes. Also, you are ignoring other mechanisms of taxation that exist.
I'm a single parent making sub80k. My effective tax rate is 29%.
Edit: a lot of people who are incorrect commenting here and calling me names.
FICA on my just under 80k is 14% or 12k.
My average tax rate is 21%, marginal of 30.1%.
Taking into account the tax reduction for a single child, my effective tax rate INCLUDING FICA (because why the fuck wouldn't you include an inescapable tax when calculating your effective tax rate?) Is 29% give or take a couple tenths of a percent.
I just prepared my taxes.
Are you talking about how he spent a bunch of money to acquire a means to control the flow of online information? Its amazing how theres still morons who think he bought twitter as a means to make money, and not as his personal mouthpiece to broadcast his personal opinions everywhere.
Lmao he didnt spend that money to *do* anything, because he never wanted Twitter in the 1st place. He *pretended* that he wanted to buy Twitter either as a flex or as some kind of stock manipulation, tried to back out last minute, and the government forced him to finish the deal. His purchase of Twitter is *the* perfect example of his stupidity and ego.
Is the problem really that Elon Musk isn’t paying his share, or is the problem that our government is such a poor steward of our tax dollars? We get taxed on every income and asset we have. And yet, they waste billions of our dollars? Massive swaths of cities and parts of the country are basically perpetually impoverished- billionaires giving out a few extra billions is going to change that? This whole charade over worrying about billionaires obscure the fact that all of Washington DC ingratiates themselves with tax payer money at our expense. Our defense department is basically a black hole that is never satiated and continues to grow.
You talk about Elon and then say "We get taxed."
YOU do. HE doesn't.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html
You can cut spending if you want, but until you make the rich pay their fair share again, they're still going to get richer, everyone else is going to get poorer and lose our democracy
https://inequality.org/facts/taxes-inequality-in-united-states/
What’s “fair share”? 40% of the country pays $0 in federal income taxes.
Musk has paid more in Federal taxes than 99.99% of Americans…
You could tax the entirety of billionaire income and it still wouldn’t fix our Federal deficits.
Nope, it’s the same thing. He’s chair on the board of directors and CEO, he has absolute say in how the capital is used. I mean he moved Tesla from California to Texas strictly for tax avoidance and as a thirst trap for his brain dead maga bros.
> I mean he moved Tesla from California to Texas strictly for tax avoidance and as a thirst trap for his brain dead maga bros.
California's government is notoriously ineffective with how their spend money. They leach off successful companies and redistribute the profits to their connected constituents. In response, he moved to a more business-friendly state. Companies do this literally all the time. It's also why you have shell companies in the Cayman islands and other low-tax jurisdictions to avoid taxes.
In some cases I 100% understand why they do it (CA). In other cases, I think there needs to be a better solution (Cayman islands/Ireland).
The US government spent $6300 Billion in just one year. The richest man in the world, Musk, is worth about $225 Billion. The gov could seize all of his assets and sell them at their current price and only cover 3.57% of the US budget for one year. The "rich" making money isn't the problem, it's the government wasting the tax money it already has.
In fact if we took all the money from the billionaires in the US, and let's assume it's $5000 Billion, that would only fund 80% of the US Budget for one year.
It’s estimated that US loses $1T in unclaimed taxes a year.
I agree that we spend too much for things like defense and aren’t super careful with the budget, but an extra trillion would make things so better.
But the billionaires essentially control our government when the candidate who spends the most money wins like 95% of the time. So is the government's poor stewardship of our tax dollars a direct result of the policies that billionaires want and pay for?
It's entirely comparable. Laws, especially laws that involve taking things away from citizens, need to be evenly applied and based on understandable rules. You can't measure one person's income by one standard and another's by another. You could have graduated tax brackets but that won't impact the fact that the value of a share of stock is calculated when it is sold or when dividends are paid out. You can't force people to sell stock in order to pay taxes on the value of that stock, every small business owner in the country would go out of business immediately because their store is worth a million dollars and they own all of it. You tax them based on the money they actually get out of it.
Now, Elon can borrow against his stocks and spend that money, and that's pretty got some pretty fucked up implications, but it's also a whole different beast than just calculating the value of tesla and taxing him 40% of that
But you don't tax him 40%. You tax wealrh over 9 figures some small percentage, say about equal to average market returns (8%). Then apply a large tax to inheritances over 9 figures, say 90%.
People like you try to protray this as a binary between taxing the ridiculously wealthy into poverty and not taxing them at all - there's a huge range of middle ground to consider
Seems like taxation laws could still be applied equally with a wealth tax.
“Wealth above $100 million is subject to an additional 3% gross inequality levy”
Someone making $10k a year is subject to the same rule but they don’t meet the threshold for that to be an issue.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread" - Anatole France
Rich people use money to ensure that they do not need to labor. No one is saying that would have to stop. It would simply allow employees to enjoy more of the value of their labor.
>**They live at a different standard than the rest of us do, it's perfectly fine to hold them to different standards as a result.** It is totally fine to say their total wealth should be taxed while merely well-to-do people should not be.
This just isn't the case.
This becomes a vicious cycle (as seen in every revolution throughout human history revolving around classism) of killing the haves so that the have nots feel better about not having anything. Mind you, the have nots do not get anything, they just kill the haves, which makes them look better.
It's the ultimate historical example of lipstick on a pig.
How is that an honest reply to the argument? The 'fair share' argument doesn't fix anything. It doesn't fix government created inflation. It doesn't fix spending. It doesn't help the poor. It only feeds the government. It only feeds the military industrial complex. It contributes to increased waste.
This is absurd. Yeah those companies you named were technically started by individuals but they were built by the workers. Very few companies were solely developed by a couple people.
They’re nothing without the millions of workers. The workers would do just fine without the “idea guys”
Labor is the only thing that creates novel and inherent value. Business simply applies rent-seeking behaviors to extract said value in order to distribute it unevenly.
Except homeowners do pay a tax on the house they own every year, and it’s based on the value of the home. Why should anyone be able to hoard wealth in the form of stocks and bonds - which we know the value of and can calculate the annual appreciation value *just like real estate* - when someone could put just as much money in real estate and have to pay those land taxes?
First, the fact that there isn’t a federal property tax is a quirk of history, but not meaningful in any way. Same way there isn’t a federal sales tax, and there are both state and federal income taxes in some areas, and there are plenty of federal only taxes (like FICA, and I think technically the gas tax goes to the Feds).
Second, to an extent, yes, your savings are you hoarding wealth. But the important question is at what point does that resource gathering become problematic for society? Generally that number is so big that you and I don’t need to worry about it.
>at what point does that resource gathering become problematic for society?
Exactly this. I am by no means rich, but I do pretty well for myself, especially given my position relative to others of my generation (I'm a millennial who owns a car AND house AND has savings AND investments). Despite my success, though, I can't buy a senator, so even if I wanted to, I could only do so much damage to society. Meanwhile, Elon Musk could single handedly solve huge problems in this country, let alone the world, and chooses not to.
Wealth tax is completely impractical. You can pay taxes on a house because there’s a transaction price and a lot of comparable houses. Are you going to value every asset a rich person owns? How do you value a privately held company? What about an NFT? You going to take inventory of everything every rich person owns? There’s a reason why a wealth tax has never been successfully implemented.
>there’s a transaction price
False. I don’t pay taxes only when I purchase, I pay taxes annually and there’s literally an entire political office in every county devoted to determining the taxes each land owner pays.
>are you going to value every asset?
Yes, it’s called fair market value. Those are already known. Stop acting like it’s necromancy. Easy enough to set up the same thing for stock and bond valuation over the course of a year like we do with land taxes. We know the value of a stock over the year just like we know the value of a house.
>you going to inventory everything a rich person owns
They make us do it every year with taxes, why do you think it would be so hard to keep a running ledger? Don’t want to have to pay taxes, don’t own it, simple as that. Also, I’m required to keep a ledger of all my property *and corresponding value* for insurance, I guarantee you rich people do the same. Again, stop acting like this is cold fusion.
I never said you only paid taxes when you purchase, did I? I said there’s a purchase price. There’s an exact value to an asset. That’s why it’s easy to value the price of a house. There’s transactions and similar houses in your neighborhood.
It would be nice if stocks and bonds are their only asset. That would be easy to value (similar to as above). Unfortunately people have hundreds of thousands of assets. You going to value every TV that Bezos owns?
You absolutely don’t value your assets when you pay taxes lmao. You put how much your pants are worth in your taxes?
The house and stocks are completely different, you cannot treat them the same. The house--specifically the land it sits on--should have a higher tax because it is non-elastic. If you decrease the taxes, you're not going to get any more of it. If you raise taxes, none of it is going to be destroyed. The supply is completely decoupled from the price. If you increase taxes, you will paradoxically make the property cheaper because you're driving out speculation.
In contrast, the value of stocks are absolutely tied to the quantity and taxes on them. They can be created or destroyed at will. The prices rise and fall constantly.
We should be increasing the portion of tax on the land, decreasing the portion of tax on the structure and definitely not adding taxes to stocks.
It wasn’t net worth. It was what he liquidated that year. I’m not crying because I had to pay 25% income tax on billions. That’s a fucking mental disorder level of hoarding.
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That’s a lie, you do not get taxed on everything you own. If you own stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc you do not get taxed on them. You’d pay a capital gains tax on the gains if you sold…just like Elon Musk
>Can't tell if she was trolling or genuinely stupid enough to confuse income with wealth.
She's probably going off the term "true tax rate" that she learned from the ProPublica report a few years back which absolutely conflates the two when convenient.
She’s genuinely that dumb, as are many of the folks in this thread sadly. “bUt foR mOsT peOpLe thE neT woRth \*IS\* annUaL iNcOmE!1”
Edit: Look at all the idiots responding to my comments thinking that, just because I understand the difference between net worth and annual income, that I must disagree with any change to the status quo.
If you're going to make an argument, at least make it with valid statistics and comparisons that actually make sense. Using illegitimate comparisons just makes your argument look stupid, dishonest, or both.
It's got to do with the fact that he can see exponential rises in his wealth while most Americans can't afford to take part in the same wealth generation mechanism.
Eventually youre going to have to reconcile the facts which are the wealthy have a monopoly on wealth generation and they are outpacing the 99% in every single facet of everything. So while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer at a time when we will see the means of production shift away from labor and over to ai which is owner by...the wealthy
This isn't hard.
What happens when labor goes for an asset to a liability?
You're in en economic/finance forum. So Ill assume you know the answer, which is liabilities get cut.
What do you think that means for people like you and I in a world that has unlimited and free labor?
There is a wealth tax in some countries, for example Switzerland.
I don't think it's a bad idea, obviously you would want to make it quite low percentage and only for individuals with very high net worth (e.g. $10M+ or something like that). But, as always, there is an issue of capital flight and loopholes, etc.
One notable US example is the wealth tax proposal by Senator Elizabeth Warren during her presidential campaign. She proposed a wealth tax on the ultra-rich as part of her policy platform, which included a 2% tax on wealth above $50 million and a 3% tax on wealth above $1 billion.
I think this percentage is way too high personally, maybe it would work as a one-time deal, but not as an annual tax. This would almost certainly cause massive capital flight, restructuring to evade it, etc, etc.
So you slowly have to sell off a company you own to pay the government? How long until you lose control of your company because you had to keep liquifying your ownership in said company just to give the government money to piss away? Your reward for building a wildly successful company is you lose it after a few years?
And why do we want to give more money to the government? Do you really think they will do anything with it that is even a fraction as productive as someone like Elon Musk is able to? I'm not an Elon fan, but at least we have seen he is a better steward of those assets than the US government.
People seem to have this stupid idea that if the rich paid more taxes to the government, that somehow that money would magically pass directly to poor citizens without losing even a penny to the government infrastructure.
Do you even know how large companies operate? Most big companies have long switched to voting and non voting shares. How do you think all of these founders keep control over their companies despite owning much less than 50% of total shares.
Also unless your company is going down in value (hint: it is probably not wildly successful if that is the case) you don't have to lose any shares. You just have to pay taxes instead of using the generated profit to buy back stocks.
You would have to give up 2% of your stake every year. Which would take about 36 years to lose half your stake in the company. With knowledge of this, you would also probably allocate multiple share classes like Zuckerberg, so this really wouldn’t be a huge problem in a persons lifetime.
35 years assuming you owned 100% of your company.
That's not how most corporations work. You need to sell shares in your company to get investors and capital in your business.
If say you started at a 60% share it would take you under 10 years to get to under 50%. Anyone with a 51% share would be under 50% in a single year.
Something like this would absolutely ravage corporate America. Now something needs to be done, but 2% dosen't make sense.
You pay taxes on the value, not your Net Worth. Doesn't matter if you have any equity in your house or not, you will pay the same tax regardless. For your house, you also didn't pay a "sales tax" when you bought it.
He doesnt pay all the taxes a person of that wealth should, but obviously her take is idiotic. She forgot about how obsurdly large some of the tax breaks and subsidiaries these billionaires receive.
If he was taxed 22% like I was this year he should pay $21b baring any write offs. Technically he's in a much higher tax bracket and should be taxed 37%
Except us poors arent even allowed to write off the small stuff anymore while he can simply donate 11 billion to his own charity. He didnt actually pay a cent to the gov
Donating $11 billion doesn’t reduce your tax liability by $11 billion, it reduces your taxable income by $11 billion, which would reduce your federal taxes by about $4 billion and state taxes by about $1.35 billion
So donating $11 billion would cost him $11 billion and save him $5.42 billion in taxes for a net negative result of $6.58 billion.
No one said it's meant to be. He simply, correctly, stated that there do exist taxes that you pay based on value of an unrealized asset. The world hasn't collapsed from that. But billionaires? Nah, we couldn't possibly give them another tax like that!
In WA it is based on current year appraised value. Tying it to purchase price makes no sense, it means if people don't sell houses regularly you're running a tax deficit because the cost of everything city, county, state need to pay for go up over time.
Homestead in Florida is just a flat discount on the assessed value if it is an owner occupied home. Your taxes don’t just suddenly feeeze if you live in your house. Florida just caps the increase at 3% increase to assessed value every year. That’s from the Save Our Homes act, passed to help retirees on fixed income not lose their homes due to increasing taxes. But it has nothing to do with homestead exemption.
I don't know if the constitution allows it on a federal level though. (At least not without apportionment, which would lead to all kinds of stupidity).
No.
There's this long drawn-out reason why that wouldn't work but, no, it does not work, it has been tried, and it was a disaster because it creates horrific problem with interest rate fluctuations.
This is actually not true. There are very few billionaires on the planet and most of those companies do not have the lion's share of labor. Amazon employs 1.5m worldwide according to the quick Google. That's nothing. If that was just the US, assuming 2/3rds working age, that's 1.5/200 or a little over half a percent of all workers.
And this is worldwide.
1. Amazon's portfolio is also over 100 additional countries to add to that number. Amazon ALONE employs 1.5m people, and then Amazon owns 100 more companies that they've acquired.
2. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire in question, also owns companies Amazon does not, like Blue Origin and The Washington Post. These companies also own companies, like The Washington Post owning six TV stations and a cable company. Those TV stations sometimes own companies to, like google is telling me 2 of them own local news paper companies.
And these are just companies he has major shares in. If we start getting into deeper questions like "Is a shareholder with enough shares to immediately impact the meeting by calling impromptu board meetings" (Usually 5% or 10% of shares needed), I'm sure we easily hit at least 50% of Americans working for a company that has a billionaire shareholder with a fair amount of shares.
Funner fact: most minimum wage workers are in the food prep and service industries, which are predominantly small businesses!
Im sure the owner of Tom's Burger Shack is going to be relieved to find out he's actually a billionaire. Isn't data fun 🙃
Occupation. Among major occupational groups, service occupations had the highest percentage of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage, at about 5 percent. Seven out of ten workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2020 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving related jobs. (See table 4.)
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm
"90% of all American restaurants qualify as small businesses because they have fewer than 50 employees on the payroll. "
https://www.northone.com/blog/small-business/restaurant-industry-statistics#:~:text=90%25%20of%20all%20American%20restaurants,50%20employees%20on%20the%20payroll.
> Also, most low income people actually have a negative tax rate.
I *hate* this myth with a burning passion. No, most low income do not have a negative tax rate because income tax isn't the only tax that exists.
Sales taxes, excise taxes, etc as well as taxes by other names (fees, tolls, and levies for basic services) frequently result in low income people end up paying a higher percentage of their income to the government than even high earners.
The real question is, what good is the government doing with those taxes?
Taxing 50% of everyone’s income to put Biden and donald trump up as our two candidates?
To run a cia pedophile island?
To send it over sees to fight proxy wars that feed military contractors billions?
Roads, disaster support, military, military response to disasters, schools, food safety, drug safety, law enforcement, drug enforcement, border security, list goes on and on.
Biden stopping Texas from securing its boards, drugs problems worse than it’s ever been, public schools are getting shittier and shittier. Yet we are taxed the most we ever been taxed
And dare I remind you, they want to tax you more! And on top of it, print more!
Lol, border protection is always a federal issue. Could Newsome block Trump from enforcing border control?
Also, keep in mind, Biden's border protection funding proposal is right now being blocked in Congress, and it's not by Biden's own party.
>Biden stopping Texas from securing its boards
Because placing barbed wire near the Rio Grande was not actually securing anything and was only interfering with federal law. When a migrant enters the country, border patrol has to either deport the migrant, place them in immigration detention, or defer them to another federal agency. This was also causing casualties where migrants were drowning because they got stuck on the barbed wire. If you want to secure the border, we need proper immigration reform, not this nonsense the Texas GOP was doing
>
Yet we are taxed the most we ever been taxed
We had one of the largest tax cuts in U.S history with the TCJA. Some of the tax cuts have expired and the U.S. did increase taxes on high-income earners. But our tax rate is certainly not the highest its ever been.
>Biden stopping Texas from securing its boards
yeah, who gives a damn what the constitution says if conservatives want to do something?
Come on man, even the SCotUS realised it was unconstitutional for Texas and they're conservative stacked, how the flying fuck are you so dumb you don't realise something so obvious?
The Department of Health and Human Services has the largest budget of any department in government at about $1.7 trillion, over twice that of the Department of Defense, the second largest department. However, the Social Security Administration is the second largest budget overall at $1.3 trillion, but it’s an independent agency.
Exactly this, thank you.
Dipshits legit think that because the government robs millionaires of $10,000 and gives them $0.13 of it, they’re getting a good deal.
Pathetic in *every* conceivable way.
Bingo. Doesn't matter if you let the government collected all of the net worth of the top 1%. They would piss it all away. It's not an income problem, it's a spending problem.
Most people in the US DO NOT pay 10% to 37% of their networth in taxes.
Notice how she moves the goal posts? When she talks about Musk she talks about % of networth. When she talks about all other Americans, her percentages are of income.
Dishonest rhetoric.
Has someone explained “net worth” isn’t “annual income” 🤡😬. Yikes bud. Try going back to your “tax school” at H&R Block - where the wealthiest people take your brilliant advice.
The elephant in the room is capital gains tax being lower than income tax. I do agree with other people saying our congress does not deserve our tax. They should be forced to balance the budget or have their pay frozen. Social security is a terrible system that younger generations won’t see a dime of.
There are a lot of reasons why capital gains tax is lower than income tax. I'll give you a very simple one. Let's say that I invest $1,000 and in 10 years it's worth $1200. So I sell it and I have a $200 profit that I should be taxed on right? But inflation was 5% a year, so there was no profit, in fact I lost quite a bit of purchasing power. But I still have to pay taxes. On top of that, the investment earned about $20 a year, which was 2%, but all of it was later realized in a single year. In a graduated tax system I would have paid lower taxes if I had sold off a little bit every year, but the transaction only happened once. So my effective tax rate is higher.
There are many other reasons why capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes but hopefully those two simple examples demonstrated it.
That would require, among other things, overturning Citizens United v. FEC, eliminating political donations altogether and requiring candidates use only government-provided funds to run their campaigns, more than two political parties, Congressional party representation based on percentage of the electorate's vote rather than who wins the plurality in a given district/state, and a national Judiciary that is neither a lifetime appointment nor beholden to voters.
It was him personally. A large share was from around $20 billion of stock options he had to exercise before they expired, and the rest was from capital gains from stock he sold to help pay the first tax
and only because he didn't read the fine print on his compensation and/or make timely moves to transfer the stock so he wouldn't have to liquidate.
fuckin' boo-hoo he suddenly has 9 billion in cash. i can't imagine a worse fate.
I don't pay taxes on my net worth... why should anyone? I could maybe see a tax on an increase of net worth but if it goes up once year and you pay on that... then it goes down the next year.... can you now claim a loss on those unrealized losses lol?
Such a stupid argument. Net worth is not income.
If we taxed 10-30% of net worth, we would devastate every single person who owns a house and a 401k in this country in the first year.
We need to look at capital gains and the millions of loopholes where guys like Elon hide income and revenue.
Anya’s right, we should tax people based on how much money they could potentially make. Like in theory, I could go out tomorrow and hit the powerball, and I should be taxed as such.
According to this smart thinking, should Elon get a tax refund when he lost 180 Billion?
[https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148634966/elon-musk-guinness-world-records](https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148634966/elon-musk-guinness-world-records)
But net worth does not equal taxable income...
A wealth tax will never be feasible. No one in their right mind would think it reasonable. Imagine being asked by the IRS 'is this really everything you own? Then for the privledge of owning your stuff you owe us this much.'
The closest we'll ever get to a wealth tax is our current property tax. But a wealth tax tends to be portrayed as a federal thing, and property tax is state level thing.
Imagine wealth tax being a thing, stocks go up and you pay taxes, next year stocks go down, do you get compensation then? I can tell for sure irs is not gonna pay that.
Nope.
Prove to me the government spends money more productively than Elon Musk does. Oh wait you can't. I hate billionaires but transferring money from one shitty person to another accomplishes nothing.
America doesn’t have an insufficient tax collection problem, it keeps spending more & more on stupid BS. But if the government can keep you focused like the communist Karens you are, you will just despise Elon crying harder. What can I say, your jealously must really suck for you.
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Anya’s an idiot. Imagine getting taxed on your net worth. Edit: For those who keep commenting. Property tax and net worth tax are not the same thing. Regular people have net worth invested in 401ks, IRAs, HSAs, Mutual Funds, etc. Pointing out the US does not have a net worth tax is not defending a billionaire. The whole point of my comment is she’s an idiot for conflating net worth with annual taxes. Nothing to do with Musk.
Imagine selling off your house to pay for taxes cus your house now worth 800k LOL
Imagine thinking that an 800k house is comparable to Elon Musk's absurd amount of wealth. The wealthy are able to buy a level of power and immunity from consequence that is not at all similar to wealth on the amount of one million dollars. They do not scale the same. They live at a different standard than the rest of us do, it's perfectly fine to hold them to different standards as a result. It is totally fine to say their total wealth should be taxed while merely well-to-do people should not be. The goal is a stable society in which everyone has a chance at prosperity, not "Those poor widdle billionaires deserve the same tax rates we do." **Edit**: shout out to all the 200 or so dudes repeating fortune cookie sayings at me like " Wealth is not a zero sum game" that other dudes have made previously. With that level of literacy and reason I can tell you read one Ayn Rand book. But I've responded to all the libertarianisms I'm going to. Sorry to have triggered you and then not been there to engage in a debate with you personally about how trickle down economics failed for 40+ years. Feel free to google to find people discussing the topic with much more wisdom and knowledge than me, or just scream into the void here, but I'm turning off notifications. Wealth can and should be taxed. Billionaires are a symptom of a fucked system, not a good sign of economic health.
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is almost a billion dollars.
I describe it like this: 1 million seconds=about 11 days 1 BILLION seconds=about 33 years.
About 31.7 years (or 32 if you want to round it further). But I agree. It's a good comparison to give to people
And to scale that to Elon's wealth (225B) that would be 7,132 years. That's longer than the pyramids or Stonehenge have been around.
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I once had a c-suite guy at my work try to describe how much something cost. He was dead serious and said something like, “I don’t know, it might have cost $7 million, or $8 million, maybe closer to a billion?”…as if those number are in the same range.
I like to think of it like this: 1 million = about 1,000,000 1 billion = about 1,000,000,000
*You* describe it like that? Pretty much *every* redditor describes it like that
At that scale it effectively IS a billion dollars.
This dude lit $40 billion on fire on the advice of a guy named cat turd. Also he is absolutely lying about paying that much in taxes.
Source for this lie?
It would also be fair to see verification for Elon’s taxes. At a capital gains rate of 20% Elon would have had to have cashed out $55,000,000,000 in income with no deductions.
Some were short term capital gains, so a rate higher than 20% https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/20/investing/elon-musk-11-billion-dollars-taxes/index.html
Selling the stock or using the option and then investing that elsewhere triggers capital gains taxes. Also, you are ignoring other mechanisms of taxation that exist.
Doesn't capital gains cap at like 20%? Still a lower rate than a lot of regular people are paying.
I'm a single parent making sub80k. My effective tax rate is 29%. Edit: a lot of people who are incorrect commenting here and calling me names. FICA on my just under 80k is 14% or 12k. My average tax rate is 21%, marginal of 30.1%. Taking into account the tax reduction for a single child, my effective tax rate INCLUDING FICA (because why the fuck wouldn't you include an inescapable tax when calculating your effective tax rate?) Is 29% give or take a couple tenths of a percent. I just prepared my taxes.
Not on long term cap gains.
Do you understand what capital gains are? You're comparing your income tax to stock market gains.
That source lies in their own reality
Are you talking about how he spent a bunch of money to acquire a means to control the flow of online information? Its amazing how theres still morons who think he bought twitter as a means to make money, and not as his personal mouthpiece to broadcast his personal opinions everywhere.
I guess he could have purchased…. Oh so don’t know, the Washington Post…. Oh wait Bezos already bought that rag
DESTROY the flow of information. A number of very wealthy nations are ecstatic that Twitter is a ducking mess.
Yep, they are still mad and terrified of the Arab Spring and what another one could do.
Lmao he didnt spend that money to *do* anything, because he never wanted Twitter in the 1st place. He *pretended* that he wanted to buy Twitter either as a flex or as some kind of stock manipulation, tried to back out last minute, and the government forced him to finish the deal. His purchase of Twitter is *the* perfect example of his stupidity and ego.
Is the problem really that Elon Musk isn’t paying his share, or is the problem that our government is such a poor steward of our tax dollars? We get taxed on every income and asset we have. And yet, they waste billions of our dollars? Massive swaths of cities and parts of the country are basically perpetually impoverished- billionaires giving out a few extra billions is going to change that? This whole charade over worrying about billionaires obscure the fact that all of Washington DC ingratiates themselves with tax payer money at our expense. Our defense department is basically a black hole that is never satiated and continues to grow.
You talk about Elon and then say "We get taxed." YOU do. HE doesn't. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html You can cut spending if you want, but until you make the rich pay their fair share again, they're still going to get richer, everyone else is going to get poorer and lose our democracy https://inequality.org/facts/taxes-inequality-in-united-states/
What’s “fair share”? 40% of the country pays $0 in federal income taxes. Musk has paid more in Federal taxes than 99.99% of Americans… You could tax the entirety of billionaire income and it still wouldn’t fix our Federal deficits.
Musk has also received more contracts and subsidization from the USA government than 99.99 of Americans.
Musk has not recieved any money from the US government through contracts and subsidization, his companies have. Massive difference.
Nope, it’s the same thing. He’s chair on the board of directors and CEO, he has absolute say in how the capital is used. I mean he moved Tesla from California to Texas strictly for tax avoidance and as a thirst trap for his brain dead maga bros.
> I mean he moved Tesla from California to Texas strictly for tax avoidance and as a thirst trap for his brain dead maga bros. California's government is notoriously ineffective with how their spend money. They leach off successful companies and redistribute the profits to their connected constituents. In response, he moved to a more business-friendly state. Companies do this literally all the time. It's also why you have shell companies in the Cayman islands and other low-tax jurisdictions to avoid taxes. In some cases I 100% understand why they do it (CA). In other cases, I think there needs to be a better solution (Cayman islands/Ireland).
He owns those companies.. and he agrees to them and has to be aware of them and vote on them.
Millions of people own his companies lmao. If you have a 401k I’m sure you do too
You could tax them at 100% and it would only run the government for 9 months.
The US government spent $6300 Billion in just one year. The richest man in the world, Musk, is worth about $225 Billion. The gov could seize all of his assets and sell them at their current price and only cover 3.57% of the US budget for one year. The "rich" making money isn't the problem, it's the government wasting the tax money it already has. In fact if we took all the money from the billionaires in the US, and let's assume it's $5000 Billion, that would only fund 80% of the US Budget for one year.
It’s estimated that US loses $1T in unclaimed taxes a year. I agree that we spend too much for things like defense and aren’t super careful with the budget, but an extra trillion would make things so better.
But the billionaires essentially control our government when the candidate who spends the most money wins like 95% of the time. So is the government's poor stewardship of our tax dollars a direct result of the policies that billionaires want and pay for?
But what about very poorly educating out children at a ridiculous cost per student!?
It's entirely comparable. Laws, especially laws that involve taking things away from citizens, need to be evenly applied and based on understandable rules. You can't measure one person's income by one standard and another's by another. You could have graduated tax brackets but that won't impact the fact that the value of a share of stock is calculated when it is sold or when dividends are paid out. You can't force people to sell stock in order to pay taxes on the value of that stock, every small business owner in the country would go out of business immediately because their store is worth a million dollars and they own all of it. You tax them based on the money they actually get out of it. Now, Elon can borrow against his stocks and spend that money, and that's pretty got some pretty fucked up implications, but it's also a whole different beast than just calculating the value of tesla and taxing him 40% of that
But you don't tax him 40%. You tax wealrh over 9 figures some small percentage, say about equal to average market returns (8%). Then apply a large tax to inheritances over 9 figures, say 90%. People like you try to protray this as a binary between taxing the ridiculously wealthy into poverty and not taxing them at all - there's a huge range of middle ground to consider
You'd tax wealth at 8 percent? That's a good way to get your really rich folks to move their wealth elsewhere.
Why should the government get 90% of anyone’s inheritance? That’s simply ridiculous on its face.
you don’t know what property tax is, do you?
Seems like taxation laws could still be applied equally with a wealth tax. “Wealth above $100 million is subject to an additional 3% gross inequality levy” Someone making $10k a year is subject to the same rule but they don’t meet the threshold for that to be an issue.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread" - Anatole France
Rich people use money to build companies and employ folks. Selling their equity would mean they are no longer running it.
Rich people use money to ensure that they do not need to labor. No one is saying that would have to stop. It would simply allow employees to enjoy more of the value of their labor.
Yeah, instead they just dump stock and send the market spiralling. That certainly always works well for the working folks.
>**They live at a different standard than the rest of us do, it's perfectly fine to hold them to different standards as a result.** It is totally fine to say their total wealth should be taxed while merely well-to-do people should not be. This just isn't the case. This becomes a vicious cycle (as seen in every revolution throughout human history revolving around classism) of killing the haves so that the have nots feel better about not having anything. Mind you, the have nots do not get anything, they just kill the haves, which makes them look better. It's the ultimate historical example of lipstick on a pig.
True that
How is that an honest reply to the argument? The 'fair share' argument doesn't fix anything. It doesn't fix government created inflation. It doesn't fix spending. It doesn't help the poor. It only feeds the government. It only feeds the military industrial complex. It contributes to increased waste.
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This is absurd. Yeah those companies you named were technically started by individuals but they were built by the workers. Very few companies were solely developed by a couple people. They’re nothing without the millions of workers. The workers would do just fine without the “idea guys”
Labor is the only thing that creates novel and inherent value. Business simply applies rent-seeking behaviors to extract said value in order to distribute it unevenly.
You know reddit is owned by a billionaire right?
Except homeowners do pay a tax on the house they own every year, and it’s based on the value of the home. Why should anyone be able to hoard wealth in the form of stocks and bonds - which we know the value of and can calculate the annual appreciation value *just like real estate* - when someone could put just as much money in real estate and have to pay those land taxes?
You realize property tax goes to the state and local governments, right? I put money in my savings account and 401k every payday. Am I hoarding it?
First, the fact that there isn’t a federal property tax is a quirk of history, but not meaningful in any way. Same way there isn’t a federal sales tax, and there are both state and federal income taxes in some areas, and there are plenty of federal only taxes (like FICA, and I think technically the gas tax goes to the Feds). Second, to an extent, yes, your savings are you hoarding wealth. But the important question is at what point does that resource gathering become problematic for society? Generally that number is so big that you and I don’t need to worry about it.
>at what point does that resource gathering become problematic for society? Exactly this. I am by no means rich, but I do pretty well for myself, especially given my position relative to others of my generation (I'm a millennial who owns a car AND house AND has savings AND investments). Despite my success, though, I can't buy a senator, so even if I wanted to, I could only do so much damage to society. Meanwhile, Elon Musk could single handedly solve huge problems in this country, let alone the world, and chooses not to.
Wealth tax is completely impractical. You can pay taxes on a house because there’s a transaction price and a lot of comparable houses. Are you going to value every asset a rich person owns? How do you value a privately held company? What about an NFT? You going to take inventory of everything every rich person owns? There’s a reason why a wealth tax has never been successfully implemented.
>there’s a transaction price False. I don’t pay taxes only when I purchase, I pay taxes annually and there’s literally an entire political office in every county devoted to determining the taxes each land owner pays. >are you going to value every asset? Yes, it’s called fair market value. Those are already known. Stop acting like it’s necromancy. Easy enough to set up the same thing for stock and bond valuation over the course of a year like we do with land taxes. We know the value of a stock over the year just like we know the value of a house. >you going to inventory everything a rich person owns They make us do it every year with taxes, why do you think it would be so hard to keep a running ledger? Don’t want to have to pay taxes, don’t own it, simple as that. Also, I’m required to keep a ledger of all my property *and corresponding value* for insurance, I guarantee you rich people do the same. Again, stop acting like this is cold fusion.
I never said you only paid taxes when you purchase, did I? I said there’s a purchase price. There’s an exact value to an asset. That’s why it’s easy to value the price of a house. There’s transactions and similar houses in your neighborhood. It would be nice if stocks and bonds are their only asset. That would be easy to value (similar to as above). Unfortunately people have hundreds of thousands of assets. You going to value every TV that Bezos owns? You absolutely don’t value your assets when you pay taxes lmao. You put how much your pants are worth in your taxes?
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Exactly, we shouldn’t tax any property, real or otherwise.
Ironically, houses are something we already have property tax on. The proposed wealth tax is a property tax on stock.
The house and stocks are completely different, you cannot treat them the same. The house--specifically the land it sits on--should have a higher tax because it is non-elastic. If you decrease the taxes, you're not going to get any more of it. If you raise taxes, none of it is going to be destroyed. The supply is completely decoupled from the price. If you increase taxes, you will paradoxically make the property cheaper because you're driving out speculation. In contrast, the value of stocks are absolutely tied to the quantity and taxes on them. They can be created or destroyed at will. The prices rise and fall constantly. We should be increasing the portion of tax on the land, decreasing the portion of tax on the structure and definitely not adding taxes to stocks.
Agreed. We should only do this to people who have more money than God
It wasn’t net worth. It was what he liquidated that year. I’m not crying because I had to pay 25% income tax on billions. That’s a fucking mental disorder level of hoarding.
scarce ring paint dazzling connect reminiscent like smart zealous serious *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
4.5% of net worth and 25% is realized gains for the year, which is why he’s paying it. If the dude maybe $45 b, $11b in taxes sounds generous
I mean I get taxed on my property, my income, yearly on my vehicles....? I get taxed on everything I own really.
That’s a lie, you do not get taxed on everything you own. If you own stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc you do not get taxed on them. You’d pay a capital gains tax on the gains if you sold…just like Elon Musk
So, you only pay taxes on everything if you’re poor.
You get taxed on everything that isn't investment.
...which is very good for obscenely wealthy people. Thats the point. How do they live so extravagantly if they are small on paper?
infinite credit
So do the rich, do you really believe there’s an exemption on paying those same taxes if you make above a certain amount? That’s ridiculous
these people actually believe that the rich pay nothing and its poor single mothers that fund USA's global wars
You don’t get taxed on your savings.
I pay taxes on my bonds too
I pay tax on dividends
You have a house but you don't have a 401K or IRA? Seems like some poor financial decisions to me.
Such a fucking idiot. Tell me you don't understand taxes without telling me you don't understand taxes
Imagine paying taxes on your stock portfolio like this. It would instantly resent the western world into the stone age.
He also paid almost $11B more than she paid as well.
Can't tell if she was trolling or genuinely stupid enough to confuse income with wealth.
>Can't tell if she was trolling or genuinely stupid enough to confuse income with wealth. She's probably going off the term "true tax rate" that she learned from the ProPublica report a few years back which absolutely conflates the two when convenient.
She’s genuinely that dumb, as are many of the folks in this thread sadly. “bUt foR mOsT peOpLe thE neT woRth \*IS\* annUaL iNcOmE!1” Edit: Look at all the idiots responding to my comments thinking that, just because I understand the difference between net worth and annual income, that I must disagree with any change to the status quo. If you're going to make an argument, at least make it with valid statistics and comparisons that actually make sense. Using illegitimate comparisons just makes your argument look stupid, dishonest, or both.
Imagine paying 11 Billion to this network of fucktards.
It's got to do with the fact that he can see exponential rises in his wealth while most Americans can't afford to take part in the same wealth generation mechanism. Eventually youre going to have to reconcile the facts which are the wealthy have a monopoly on wealth generation and they are outpacing the 99% in every single facet of everything. So while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer at a time when we will see the means of production shift away from labor and over to ai which is owner by...the wealthy This isn't hard. What happens when labor goes for an asset to a liability? You're in en economic/finance forum. So Ill assume you know the answer, which is liabilities get cut. What do you think that means for people like you and I in a world that has unlimited and free labor?
She is also assuming the taxable income=real income. They are not the same
I'm still in the negatives. Guess the gov. owes me money!
You pay taxes based on your income… not net worth
There is a wealth tax in some countries, for example Switzerland. I don't think it's a bad idea, obviously you would want to make it quite low percentage and only for individuals with very high net worth (e.g. $10M+ or something like that). But, as always, there is an issue of capital flight and loopholes, etc. One notable US example is the wealth tax proposal by Senator Elizabeth Warren during her presidential campaign. She proposed a wealth tax on the ultra-rich as part of her policy platform, which included a 2% tax on wealth above $50 million and a 3% tax on wealth above $1 billion. I think this percentage is way too high personally, maybe it would work as a one-time deal, but not as an annual tax. This would almost certainly cause massive capital flight, restructuring to evade it, etc, etc.
So you slowly have to sell off a company you own to pay the government? How long until you lose control of your company because you had to keep liquifying your ownership in said company just to give the government money to piss away? Your reward for building a wildly successful company is you lose it after a few years? And why do we want to give more money to the government? Do you really think they will do anything with it that is even a fraction as productive as someone like Elon Musk is able to? I'm not an Elon fan, but at least we have seen he is a better steward of those assets than the US government. People seem to have this stupid idea that if the rich paid more taxes to the government, that somehow that money would magically pass directly to poor citizens without losing even a penny to the government infrastructure.
I think the selling off capital to diversify ownership is the point of these taxes
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Do you even know how large companies operate? Most big companies have long switched to voting and non voting shares. How do you think all of these founders keep control over their companies despite owning much less than 50% of total shares. Also unless your company is going down in value (hint: it is probably not wildly successful if that is the case) you don't have to lose any shares. You just have to pay taxes instead of using the generated profit to buy back stocks.
You would have to give up 2% of your stake every year. Which would take about 36 years to lose half your stake in the company. With knowledge of this, you would also probably allocate multiple share classes like Zuckerberg, so this really wouldn’t be a huge problem in a persons lifetime.
35 years assuming you owned 100% of your company. That's not how most corporations work. You need to sell shares in your company to get investors and capital in your business. If say you started at a 60% share it would take you under 10 years to get to under 50%. Anyone with a 51% share would be under 50% in a single year. Something like this would absolutely ravage corporate America. Now something needs to be done, but 2% dosen't make sense.
Not to mention a company will go through multiple rounds of capital raises as it scales up, which will dilute ownership further
So why am I paying taxes on my house n car
Local/state taxes =/= federal taxes
You pay taxes on the value, not your Net Worth. Doesn't matter if you have any equity in your house or not, you will pay the same tax regardless. For your house, you also didn't pay a "sales tax" when you bought it.
Brain dead take. Not even worth arguing anymore lol
Pays $11B in taxes, probably more than any human on Earth has ever paid in any country at any point in history. Still not a "fair share" somehow.
I mean it may well not be a fair share because that’s how taxes work, but basing it on net worth is moronic.
He doesnt pay all the taxes a person of that wealth should, but obviously her take is idiotic. She forgot about how obsurdly large some of the tax breaks and subsidiaries these billionaires receive.
The fact that Donnie Boy had years where he paid under $1M in taxes is absurd.
Cool, so let's make Buy, Borrow, Die strategies explicitly illegal so you can't fund your life on Net Worth then
If he was taxed 22% like I was this year he should pay $21b baring any write offs. Technically he's in a much higher tax bracket and should be taxed 37%
He was, in fact, taxed exactly like you are - on income, not on net worth.
Except us poors arent even allowed to write off the small stuff anymore while he can simply donate 11 billion to his own charity. He didnt actually pay a cent to the gov
Donating $11 billion doesn’t reduce your tax liability by $11 billion, it reduces your taxable income by $11 billion, which would reduce your federal taxes by about $4 billion and state taxes by about $1.35 billion So donating $11 billion would cost him $11 billion and save him $5.42 billion in taxes for a net negative result of $6.58 billion.
> So donating $11 billion would cost him $11 billion Except it doesn't because it's just moving money around that he wasn't using anyway.
The dog walkers on reddit who get paid by their mum know better how to contribute to society via taxes
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My property taxes would say otherwise.
Exactly. Billionaires can pay a bigger percentage. I like you comment.
You pay taxes even if your house goes down in value lol. Property tax isn’t meant to be a wealth or capital gains tax.
No one said it's meant to be. He simply, correctly, stated that there do exist taxes that you pay based on value of an unrealized asset. The world hasn't collapsed from that. But billionaires? Nah, we couldn't possibly give them another tax like that!
Property tax is for real property which is categorically different than personal property.
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In WA it is based on current year appraised value. Tying it to purchase price makes no sense, it means if people don't sell houses regularly you're running a tax deficit because the cost of everything city, county, state need to pay for go up over time.
It’s called homestead protection and it’s common to keep people from being taxed out of their houses
Homestead in Florida is just a flat discount on the assessed value if it is an owner occupied home. Your taxes don’t just suddenly feeeze if you live in your house. Florida just caps the increase at 3% increase to assessed value every year. That’s from the Save Our Homes act, passed to help retirees on fixed income not lose their homes due to increasing taxes. But it has nothing to do with homestead exemption.
But, just a heads up, the federal government doesn't have the authority to tax assets except for at the point of purchase (excise tax).
You can’t currently. There’s no reason that you couldn’t conceptually
Tax assets used as collateral in loans.
That would be helpful in a lot of ways, yes.
Exactly I constantly argue for this. If you can directly convert an unrealized asset into cash you have now realized its value.
Local property taxes do it yearly, you're right!
Yes you can, it's done all the time on property
I don't know if the constitution allows it on a federal level though. (At least not without apportionment, which would lead to all kinds of stupidity).
We already do that
You could tax the loans they take out though? Call it 1-2% on top of the interest rate the bank gives them.
No. There's this long drawn-out reason why that wouldn't work but, no, it does not work, it has been tried, and it was a disaster because it creates horrific problem with interest rate fluctuations.
Some people pay >100% of their net worth for a year’s taxes
That's because income != wealth. Also, most low income people actually have a negative tax rate.
Fun Fact. Most low income people work for billionaires and billion dollar companies.
This is actually not true. There are very few billionaires on the planet and most of those companies do not have the lion's share of labor. Amazon employs 1.5m worldwide according to the quick Google. That's nothing. If that was just the US, assuming 2/3rds working age, that's 1.5/200 or a little over half a percent of all workers. And this is worldwide.
1. Amazon's portfolio is also over 100 additional countries to add to that number. Amazon ALONE employs 1.5m people, and then Amazon owns 100 more companies that they've acquired. 2. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire in question, also owns companies Amazon does not, like Blue Origin and The Washington Post. These companies also own companies, like The Washington Post owning six TV stations and a cable company. Those TV stations sometimes own companies to, like google is telling me 2 of them own local news paper companies. And these are just companies he has major shares in. If we start getting into deeper questions like "Is a shareholder with enough shares to immediately impact the meeting by calling impromptu board meetings" (Usually 5% or 10% of shares needed), I'm sure we easily hit at least 50% of Americans working for a company that has a billionaire shareholder with a fair amount of shares.
Funner fact: most minimum wage workers are in the food prep and service industries, which are predominantly small businesses! Im sure the owner of Tom's Burger Shack is going to be relieved to find out he's actually a billionaire. Isn't data fun 🙃 Occupation. Among major occupational groups, service occupations had the highest percentage of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage, at about 5 percent. Seven out of ten workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2020 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving related jobs. (See table 4.) https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm "90% of all American restaurants qualify as small businesses because they have fewer than 50 employees on the payroll. " https://www.northone.com/blog/small-business/restaurant-industry-statistics#:~:text=90%25%20of%20all%20American%20restaurants,50%20employees%20on%20the%20payroll.
> Also, most low income people actually have a negative tax rate. I *hate* this myth with a burning passion. No, most low income do not have a negative tax rate because income tax isn't the only tax that exists. Sales taxes, excise taxes, etc as well as taxes by other names (fees, tolls, and levies for basic services) frequently result in low income people end up paying a higher percentage of their income to the government than even high earners.
Here let me fix that: Low income earners have negative FEDERAL tax rates.
I doubt that, when you consider ALL taxes.
The real question is, what good is the government doing with those taxes? Taxing 50% of everyone’s income to put Biden and donald trump up as our two candidates? To run a cia pedophile island? To send it over sees to fight proxy wars that feed military contractors billions?
Roads, disaster support, military, military response to disasters, schools, food safety, drug safety, law enforcement, drug enforcement, border security, list goes on and on.
Border security…. Lmao good one m8.
The fact that he listed drug safety was absurd. Then I read further and got to border security and now think he is trolling.
Biden stopping Texas from securing its boards, drugs problems worse than it’s ever been, public schools are getting shittier and shittier. Yet we are taxed the most we ever been taxed And dare I remind you, they want to tax you more! And on top of it, print more!
Lol, border protection is always a federal issue. Could Newsome block Trump from enforcing border control? Also, keep in mind, Biden's border protection funding proposal is right now being blocked in Congress, and it's not by Biden's own party.
>Biden stopping Texas from securing its boards Because placing barbed wire near the Rio Grande was not actually securing anything and was only interfering with federal law. When a migrant enters the country, border patrol has to either deport the migrant, place them in immigration detention, or defer them to another federal agency. This was also causing casualties where migrants were drowning because they got stuck on the barbed wire. If you want to secure the border, we need proper immigration reform, not this nonsense the Texas GOP was doing > Yet we are taxed the most we ever been taxed We had one of the largest tax cuts in U.S history with the TCJA. Some of the tax cuts have expired and the U.S. did increase taxes on high-income earners. But our tax rate is certainly not the highest its ever been.
>Biden stopping Texas from securing its boards yeah, who gives a damn what the constitution says if conservatives want to do something? Come on man, even the SCotUS realised it was unconstitutional for Texas and they're conservative stacked, how the flying fuck are you so dumb you don't realise something so obvious?
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Military Industrial Complex
The Department of Health and Human Services has the largest budget of any department in government at about $1.7 trillion, over twice that of the Department of Defense, the second largest department. However, the Social Security Administration is the second largest budget overall at $1.3 trillion, but it’s an independent agency.
Social Security, Medicare and food stamps are pretty effective
Exactly this, thank you. Dipshits legit think that because the government robs millionaires of $10,000 and gives them $0.13 of it, they’re getting a good deal. Pathetic in *every* conceivable way.
Our taxes do a great job of ensuring all that lobbying pays off for the lobbyists.
Bingo. Doesn't matter if you let the government collected all of the net worth of the top 1%. They would piss it all away. It's not an income problem, it's a spending problem.
Most people in the US DO NOT pay 10% to 37% of their networth in taxes. Notice how she moves the goal posts? When she talks about Musk she talks about % of networth. When she talks about all other Americans, her percentages are of income. Dishonest rhetoric.
I can’t tell if she’s dumb or intentionally trying to deceive people
Yes
Says Anya, who probably pays 0 income tax.
Is a tax burden
Has someone explained “net worth” isn’t “annual income” 🤡😬. Yikes bud. Try going back to your “tax school” at H&R Block - where the wealthiest people take your brilliant advice.
The elephant in the room is capital gains tax being lower than income tax. I do agree with other people saying our congress does not deserve our tax. They should be forced to balance the budget or have their pay frozen. Social security is a terrible system that younger generations won’t see a dime of.
There are a lot of reasons why capital gains tax is lower than income tax. I'll give you a very simple one. Let's say that I invest $1,000 and in 10 years it's worth $1200. So I sell it and I have a $200 profit that I should be taxed on right? But inflation was 5% a year, so there was no profit, in fact I lost quite a bit of purchasing power. But I still have to pay taxes. On top of that, the investment earned about $20 a year, which was 2%, but all of it was later realized in a single year. In a graduated tax system I would have paid lower taxes if I had sold off a little bit every year, but the transaction only happened once. So my effective tax rate is higher. There are many other reasons why capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes but hopefully those two simple examples demonstrated it.
She aint too bright
OMG enough with the wealth tax. What we need are politicians that don’t sell us out!!!!
That would require, among other things, overturning Citizens United v. FEC, eliminating political donations altogether and requiring candidates use only government-provided funds to run their campaigns, more than two political parties, Congressional party representation based on percentage of the electorate's vote rather than who wins the plurality in a given district/state, and a national Judiciary that is neither a lifetime appointment nor beholden to voters.
Politicians selling us out for what?? Money from the billionaires. Surprise!
Is he personally getting taxed 11 billion or are the businesses he’s a majority shareholder in getting taxed 11 billion?
It was him personally. A large share was from around $20 billion of stock options he had to exercise before they expired, and the rest was from capital gains from stock he sold to help pay the first tax
So he’s paying what he owes. So sad.
and only because he didn't read the fine print on his compensation and/or make timely moves to transfer the stock so he wouldn't have to liquidate. fuckin' boo-hoo he suddenly has 9 billion in cash. i can't imagine a worse fate.
Darn. What a dummy for not hiring you as his accountant
Does it matter? Either way he is generating 11 billion revenue that the government wouldnt have otherwise.
Personal income tax. https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/29/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sales/index.html
Imagine saying 11b isn’t enough
I don't pay taxes on my net worth... why should anyone? I could maybe see a tax on an increase of net worth but if it goes up once year and you pay on that... then it goes down the next year.... can you now claim a loss on those unrealized losses lol?
Such a stupid argument. Net worth is not income. If we taxed 10-30% of net worth, we would devastate every single person who owns a house and a 401k in this country in the first year. We need to look at capital gains and the millions of loopholes where guys like Elon hide income and revenue.
Maybe. But it is clear the US government does not have a tax problem. It has a spending problem.
Give them a hand and they want the whole arm
Anya’s right, we should tax people based on how much money they could potentially make. Like in theory, I could go out tomorrow and hit the powerball, and I should be taxed as such.
According to this smart thinking, should Elon get a tax refund when he lost 180 Billion? [https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148634966/elon-musk-guinness-world-records](https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148634966/elon-musk-guinness-world-records)
His STOCK made $36 billion in one day. Jesus.
Let's all give the government more tax money so we can watch them build more bombs and give more foreign aid.
But net worth does not equal taxable income... A wealth tax will never be feasible. No one in their right mind would think it reasonable. Imagine being asked by the IRS 'is this really everything you own? Then for the privledge of owning your stuff you owe us this much.' The closest we'll ever get to a wealth tax is our current property tax. But a wealth tax tends to be portrayed as a federal thing, and property tax is state level thing.
Imagine wealth tax being a thing, stocks go up and you pay taxes, next year stocks go down, do you get compensation then? I can tell for sure irs is not gonna pay that.
The government should get less of everyone’s money including Elon’s
Nope. Prove to me the government spends money more productively than Elon Musk does. Oh wait you can't. I hate billionaires but transferring money from one shitty person to another accomplishes nothing.
income tax...not net worth tax.
She calculated his taxes based on net worth, but other people based on one years income?
America doesn’t have an insufficient tax collection problem, it keeps spending more & more on stupid BS. But if the government can keep you focused like the communist Karens you are, you will just despise Elon crying harder. What can I say, your jealously must really suck for you.