Comment by vessenes
4 hours ago
This just isn't true, unless you're the president.
Who is the single largest taxpayer in US history? I'll wait while you google it.
4 hours ago
This just isn't true, unless you're the president.
Who is the single largest taxpayer in US history? I'll wait while you google it.
According to Google, this claim is sourced to a person rather famous for baseless claims, from the founding of companies he owns, to the capabilities of his products, to cash prizes for registering to vote, to when he will send humans to mars.
Continuing to accept this person as a credible source of information isnt a reasonable thing to do.
Prof G Markets podcast just had an episode on this with Ray Madoff. They talk about the claim that "the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of the income tax". But Ray points out that is misleading because the 1% is basically lawyers, physicians, accountants etc that make like $500,000/yr. These people still pay income tax and that's the group paying 40% of income tax. What that claim misses is the 0.1% that pay 0 income tax because they have no income. The claim makes people believe that the billionaires are the ones paying that huge sum but we fail to realize that the 1% is our neighbours, not just the billionaires flying private jets across the world.
$0 just feels like a concept -- I can imagine a really high quality structuring exercise that gets tax low by making sure leverage on capital is what's used for spending, but I'd be really surprised to see a 0.1%-er (or 0.001%-er) post $0 income tax. For one, it's disadvantageous for certain kinds of bank interactions. But also, capital calls come in, investments that are made often require a step-up in basis, leverage is taken out on assets that require a margin call or a sale, there are alternative tax regimes, the corporations that are owned by these parties have their own tax burdens..
To say the wealthy can afford to radically optimize taxes and that our system taxes capital much more lightly than labor seems accurate to me, but I just haven't seen offers for "pay zero tax for all your life" from high grade professionals.
If US citizens want that, they generally give up their citizenship, pay their exit tax, and live in a low tax jurisdiction. I do know people like this, and they are very unlike the 0.1% types you're referring to here, and they've given up the benefits of being a US citizen in exchange for their preferred lifestyle. (And paid a mark to market exit tax on all assets on their way out of the country)
> I'd be really surprised to see a 0.1%-er (or 0.001%-er) post $0 income tax.
Bezos did, in 2007.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
> Consider Bezos’ 2007, one of the years he paid zero in federal income taxes. Amazon’s stock more than doubled. Bezos’ fortune leapt $3.8 billion, according to Forbes, whose wealth estimates are widely cited. How did a person enjoying that sort of wealth explosion end up paying no income tax?
Or the President (now permanently immune from audit, incidentally):
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...
> He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
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There's not an easy source for that information, especially not inflation adjusted. Who do you think the answer is?
Musk paid $11B in a year his wealth went up $86B on his way to likely being the first trillionaire. Are we supposed to cry about it?
The median net worth in the US is ~$200k. A lot of middle-class folks have likely paid more taxes in their lifetime than their entire net worth.
Nope. Just not post things like "billionaires pay no taxes."
They don't pay zero tax, for sure.
But they certainly get clever about techniques to keep it as low as possible, for shockingly low effective tax rates.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov... has a whole bunch of examples.
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The only reason he paid $11B that year was because he exercised Tesla options. Many other years his tax bill has ranged from zero to millions.
What did he pay in previous years? To borrow a phrase, I’ll wait while you google it.
As a percentage of their income? Because that's the only number I care about. You don't get to hoard wealth off the backs of tens of thousands of workers and then act like paying a smaller percentage is some good deed being done. The more one benefits from society (and billionaires depend most on the financial security and infrastructure setup by society), the more one needs to pay back into the system they gained their wealth from.