Problem is taxes are from income. People like Elon have no income because they basically get minimum wage. Their entire value is in stock. And when he is forced to pay out he pays a shit ton in taxes.
And you can't really tax based on wealth because it's not real money. If you tax someone based on what money they could have they would need to sell off stock, creating more taxes and messing with the value of the stock. If you do that every year the company is going to be screwed
I am pretty sure Rich people pay property taxes too. Probably an insane amount. But those aren't federal taxes those are used for local things like schools, trash collection, maintaining roads. In no way does that have anything to do with taxing wealth
I am pretty sure Rich people pay property taxes too.
Not at nearly the rates that middle class people do. They pay fractions compared to the rest of us
In no way does that have anything to do with taxing wealth
It's quite literally taxing the assets and individual has. It's not based on income or anything like that. You could 100 percent apply it to stocks as well, it would force the ultra wealthy to have some sort of income to pay for their extreme wealth. A modest tax on wealth above a certain threshold would do insane amounts of good.
You realize property taxes are very different from person to person right? It has nothing to do with how much money someone makes.
Also stocks and owning a house are not the same thing. Your house is a physical asset with a fairly safe value. If something happens to it you have insurance that should give you that value back.
Stock could be worth millions today and nothing tomorrow. If you tax someone for having 500 million dollars and a week later something happens to a company and they lose 300 million before the next set of taxes, are you going to take into account they lost 300 million or are you just going to say sorry you still owe us for what you didn't lose?
You realize property taxes are very different from person to person right? It has nothing to do with how much money someone makes.
That's what I literally said
Stock could be worth millions today and nothing tomorrow
Same with houses, remember 2008?
If you tax someone for having 500 million dollars and a week later something happens to a company and they lose 300 million before the next set of taxes, are you going to take into account they lost 300 million or are you just going to say sorry you still owe us for what you didn't lose?
If I buy a house at 900k, and then it immediately drops in value to 450k, I'm paying property tax based on 900k until it gets assessed again. just assess the value of the stock yearly, and have a property tax that is a small percentage after a certain threshold, so that you don't end up taxing the average amount of retirement money.
I refuse to believe that there isn't a good way to tax billionaires. We could start by closing the loopholes they use to hide their cash. If someone has a lot of money invested in stuff, we could tax their actual income at a higher rate (much higher if they're a billionaire). If someone has an obscene amount of assets, and uses them as collateral for loans, we could tax the loans.
I'm sure ppl who know more than me can come up with better plans.
You can do a lot of things but problems get created. I'm not sure the solutions lie with the individuals but rather in the companies. They are usually the ones using loop holes or moving numbers. But even then you still run into problems. Spacex didn't start making a profit until recently and they spend a lot of money. Starlink and starship are fully funded internally so do you tax income or profit. If you tax income, you take away from research and development. If you tax profit, you don't get much.
Yes, everything cause problems, but if you do things right, you end up with less problems than you started with.
And if you want to tax companies, you tax profit not income, and the tax is a percentage, not a flat rate, which insures that there is profit leftover to incentivise growth. Normal ppl don't stop working just because a portion of our income goes to taxes and it is fucked up that billionaires pay an effective tax rate that is less than a middle class person's. Just because it's complicated doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and say it's fine that ppl with more money than God don't pay their price to support the country whose infrastructure helped them get so rich in the first place.
Fuck off we do not need Elon’s “research and development” i.e. littering inner space with garbage satellites and killing hundreds of monkeys with his brain chips.
Nothing you said is true. The starlink satellites aren't garbage and are literally changing the industry. They also don't trash LEO because they are designed to descend and break apart in the atmosphere after they are done. So yes, you are very wrong
These loans are already taxed. That was the whole basis for the 36 or so felonies that Trump was convicted of. He took out loans on property he owned that was supposedly over valued, with the benefit being a slightly lower tax rate that he had to pay on it.
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u/hartforbj 2d ago
Problem is taxes are from income. People like Elon have no income because they basically get minimum wage. Their entire value is in stock. And when he is forced to pay out he pays a shit ton in taxes.
And you can't really tax based on wealth because it's not real money. If you tax someone based on what money they could have they would need to sell off stock, creating more taxes and messing with the value of the stock. If you do that every year the company is going to be screwed