He also said that he couldn't possibly pay more tax because he doesn't have enough money
We're doing the tax thing again....
- Thread starter Trunkage
- Start date
Hmmm. He stepped down from Amazon and he doesn't officially work at WaPo (which he owns). Since he's unemployed and collects government welfare checks, does this make Bezos a welfare queen?
What interest? The central banks suppressed the interest rates into negative numbers and printed so much money that financial institutions need to get rid of it will they not have to stash it at the federal reserve for high costs. What do you think is preferable; that or long outstanding debt with Bezos who can deduct the debt from his income including the interest rates? The bank has their investments(stock traded against debt) and Bezos has an unlimited money supply he has to pay zero tax over. Why would he ever want to pay back that loan?
I have actually great admiration for Bezos. I mean, what he accomplished in life is unreal. The money he earned is value he created with Amazon that didn't exist before. But at the very least you can expect him to pay his fair share like the rest of us mortals.Hmmm. He stepped down from Amazon and he doesn't officially work at WaPo (which he owns). Since he's unemployed and collects government welfare checks, does this make Bezos a welfare queen?
You call it dishonest, but it's the practical reality!
I think it is very reasonable we can be angry that people with billions stashed away, who spend millions and millions a year, pay less tax than I do. If this is "legitimate", then I move we change the laws so that it is not.
Except loans don't appear to be bad for billionaires. They appear to be a way of accessing money where they pay less in interest than they would in tax.
So, let's say you want $10 billion and have $100 billion in shares, with a 20% tax if they are realised. You would need to realise $12.5 billion in shares, $2.5 billion of which would be tax. Or you take out a loan using your shares as collateral. Because you're so rich, the interest rate is tiny, and likely less than the $2.5 billion in tax.
Let's imagine that I've convinced the government to let me have all my pay and not be tax til the end of the financial year.
I used all that extra pay to buy stocks, pay off mortgage, start new businesses
I'm now illiquid. My money is all tied up. Therefore I should not have to pay tax.
Tstorm logic
I used all that extra pay to buy stocks, pay off mortgage, start new businesses
I'm now illiquid. My money is all tied up. Therefore I should not have to pay tax.
Tstorm logic
So adjust tax rates according to someone's wealth, judged not only by money but by revenue-generating property and stocks.
It looks a little less "silly" to be upset about it, when one remembers that ordinary people have been told for years that their vital services need to be stripped back because the money isn't there to fund them.
Bezos isn't exploiting anything to qualify for tax credits. He didn't have much income that year. Is it really impossible to imagine someone with billions wouldn't need to cash in on it literally every year?
They don't pay less tax than you do. They may at times pay less income tax than you, if in a year they have less income. There are other taxes, like sales tax. If they spend millions and millions, they are going to get taxed on all that spending at the very least.
You would have to pay tax, and you wouldn't be able to, and it would be your own stupid fault. That's not what's happening. Bezos isn't being paid billions and choosing to put it into Amazon stock. He's just maintaining ownership of the stock while it goes up in value, but that's imaginary money; it doesn't exist until that stock is sold. It's not like real money that was spent on stocks, Bezos has never seen the amount of money that he is worth. If you bought a stock worth $12.37, and it grew to $430,282, would you be able to pay tax on even a modest percent tax on that increase without selling it? Is being forced to sell your possessions to pay taxes a tenable system? If your house jumped $100,000 in value in a housing bubble, would you be able to afford it if that was taxed as income? The market value of your possessions are dependent on what other people would pay for them. Do you really want a world where if other people are willing to pay enough for your possessions, the government comes in and taxes you on that value, whether or not you can afford it? Do you like the idea of being forced to sell what you own to pay the taxes on it? That's what taxing wealth would do. It would not work out well.
See above. Taxing the imaginary money someone might have if they sold their possessions is a bad idea.
Comedy gold!
Protip, that's called gentrification and that's precisely what happens now already, your taxes climb with the value of your property and people get priced out of their homes. But Bezos the welfare queen gets his welfare checks and buys more houses.
Good job defending that.
a) Gentrification happens primarily in rental properties with rising rent. I don't think you personally intend to argue that taxes are the cause of rent increases.
b) If you see a bad thing as a result of taxing one asset at a relatively small percentage, why would you think taxing all wealth at a larger percentage is a good idea?
It also hits home owners through property taxes, the exact thing you're complaining shouldn't happen, happens. Right now. But only to people like you and me.
But yes, I would argue that tax increases would cause landlords to pass the cost on to customers, though will admit the first driver of rent increases would be a sudden market of people willing to pay more.
Because I can read.
Fiat currency is more real than stock valuations which predate (modern) fiat currency is a hell of a take.
Edit: America pulled its currency’s ties to gold during the Nixon administration, the stock market has existed since at least the 18th century. The money you pay taxes with is way more imaginary than Bezos’s stock valuation.
Edit2: an answer that never gets put forward, if billionaires don’t wanna liquidize their assets so they can be taxed on it, and forcing them to sell their stocks for a property tax would be “too unstable,” why not just pay in stocks? The government can own stocks. This isn’t a new thing.
Edit: America pulled its currency’s ties to gold during the Nixon administration, the stock market has existed since at least the 18th century. The money you pay taxes with is way more imaginary than Bezos’s stock valuation.
Edit2: an answer that never gets put forward, if billionaires don’t wanna liquidize their assets so they can be taxed on it, and forcing them to sell their stocks for a property tax would be “too unstable,” why not just pay in stocks? The government can own stocks. This isn’t a new thing.
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Nuh-uh, coins and bills that only have value because of the force of the state are totally different from property claims that are backed up by the force of the state.
Just so we are all clear here. I'm assuming that you think Bezos income is all stock increases?
Billionaires think they can help the poor better than anyone else including the governments. How narcissistic. I think buying tax-deductible paintings, naming shit on colleges, and helping a non-systemic, universal, and to be real here mostly non-people of color portion of the US and or the world is going to fix all of the world's problems. Crazy, they are delusional. You need to create a government that helps either everyone and or the people who need it the most. Billionaires are doing neither.
I think that if somebody owns so much stock that liquidating it all would crash a national market, then that person owns *way* too much stock and should have most of it taken away for safe keeping
I think before edit 2 you realized what my answer is going to be.
Fair. Real vs imaginary isn't the best way to phrase what I'm saying. But that fiat currency is both the currency you pay taxes with and the measure people are using to describe people's wealth. You have to convert it to dollars, whether or not the value of the dollar is real.
To be perfectly clear, the technical answer to that question is no. Stock increases are not income, because income is defined as money received, and you don't receive the money for your stock increasing in value until you sell it, so sales of stock are where most of Bezos income comes from.
And from the other angle, increases in stock value are where most of Bezos wealth increases come from. His net worth is currently speculated at ~$195 billion. The market value of his stock in Amazon is $178 billion. Bezos' net worth a little over a decade ago was $12.3 billion, and the value of his Amazon stock at the time was $11.7 billion. Between these data point, Bezos sold a bunch of stock, dropping from 89 million share to 51 millions shares, but the shares he still has are worth 30 times as much now. Yes, his increase in wealth is almost entirely from the value of Amazon stocks increasing.
You know perfectly well I mean proportionally less than I do.
They pay less sales tax as a proportion of income, too, because a much higher proportion of their income goes into savings, where I need to spend the majority of my income.
No. This is just economically illiterate. It's not "imaginary money", it's a different form of wealth.
Stocks and shares may fluctuate in value but - guess what - so does money. So does everything. If I have ÂŁ5000 in the bank and the pound is devalued 50% tomorrow, my ÂŁ5000 is worth half as much tomorrow. If I find a gold seam under my house, my land property value increases and if it turns out to have an unstable abandoned mine shaft under it, it decreases. And so on.
The reason that corporate execs pay themselves in forms other than straightforward money as salary is overwhelmingly to avoid taxation. Sure, they put a pretty gloss on it with claims like encouraging good performance and loyalty, but really it's tax avoidance.
It's very much not "imaginary"; this is like arguing that actual dollar bills don't count as wealth because they're not being spent right now. It's just one extra step. Dollar bills are, after all, just a representation of value; an I.O.U.
But if you're terribly concerned about overtaxing some people, make the "wealth adjustment" only kick in over a certain level of wealth. Maybe it only applies if they have more than 1 million, and then it only applies to the wealth above that 1 million mark.
That would essentially ensure that it would only apply to people who could handily afford it.
The long and the short of it, though, is that these are all excuses to find ways around a fairer distribution of the tax burden. Close the fucking loopholes. I don't really give much of a shit if it might end up being a bit unfair on some millionaires over others. It'd be a damn sight better than the current system, which lets millionaires as a group get away with murder, and working-class (and lower-middle-class) people get shafted.
That's not what this is about. When people are paid in stock, it is reported on the W-2 as income and treated sort of as though they were paid money and then immediately bought stock with it. You do not avoid income taxes on that, other than if the stock increases in value after you get it, and then you only pay capital gains on the difference when you sell. That's not how Bezos is so wealthy though. His number of stock has gone way down in fact. The increase in his wealth isn't being paid in stock, it actually has no connection at all to what Amazon pays him, it's from the stock he already owns increasing in value, and the only way he's avoiding tax on that increase is by not selling all his stock. That's it.
You have to try to understand what is going on before you can make such a demand. Almost everything people think are loopholes are safety nets for regular people that you just wish didn't apply to rich people. I agree, the tax system needs work, and the wealthy should be paying more, but I don't think forcing people to sell off their assets to pay taxes on the assets they haven't sold is in any way reasonable. Imagine for a moment a middle class person starts a company, puts it in the stock market, is hugely successful, and suddenly their net worth has skyrocketed. If they have a modest salary but their stocks are now worth millions, the only way that person could possibly pay taxes on that wealth increase is by selling some stock. And who is going to be able to afford that newly expensive stock? Already rich people. Congratulations, you just accelerated the concentration of wealth. I'm sure that's what you intended, right?