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Man its really annoying to see people constantly make up this whole "rich people dont pay taxes" nonsense.. If you review their actual tax records you'll see Elon paid about 1/3 of his income as taxes and Bezos about 1/4, which is actually quite high. But yea lets just make shit up instead and manipulate the numbers to show some "true" tax rate that is really just some fantasy as close to 0 as we can distort, cant just make up fake numbers and think its useful to addressing any problems that might exist.
@freemo Actually there is another interesting angle on all this. Suppose everybody including those persons (Bezos, Buffet, et al) agrees that indeed they need to be taxed more (BTW, e.g., Buffet and Gates are on the record saying exactly that). Beyond certain level of wealth you cannot expect these people to have a savings account in a bank. So it's natural that they store their wealth in shares of companies, holdings, etc. So the question becomes: _How to create a tax setup which will cover these perfectly legal schemas?_ Or will we really force these people to own everything as a person?
@FailForward Huh? Those schemes are already taxed at extraordinary amounts. Owning something and taking all the risks of loss that entails and then needing to pay half of all your incom as tax is simply unacceptable IMO and relies on the fallacy of money being a 0-sum game. The false idea that some people having more money must means others have less as a result.. its not how money works
@FailForward That is somewhat moot becauSE eventually shared get sold, the longer you held them before selling and the more value the accumulated the more tax you spend when you liquidate. So all profit will eventually be taxed, not to do so means you never have the money to buy anything anyway. Even if you try to pull out dividends on your shares youd get taxed.
@freemo Well, what is "extraordinary" is relative.
Anyhow, I do not know all the details of e.g., USA, but where I know how things work (EU mostly), transfers of shares between corporate entities are not taxed. Only when you convert those shares into money you get taxed either as revenue, or capital gains, or such. And here we speak about wealthy people owning primarily shares of companies which trade with the world.