Comment by rayiner

That article actually proves the opposite of what you’re saying: “For the top 1 %, new borrowing each year is fairly small: 1–2 % of economic income. ‘Buy, borrow, die’ is not a dominant tax avoidance strategy for the rich.”

OP above said that billionaires pay for their lifestyle by taking loans they never pay lack, and the article says that isn’t a common approach.

> 1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial.

No, it’s not substantial because very few people make $100 million a year, while many people make the median income.

For example, billionaires last year added $1.5 trillion to their wealth, of which 56% was unrealized gains. If you take 2% of those gains as in the article, you get $16.8 billion that should be taxed as income but isn’t being taxed. I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate or whatever you want to do. But it would raise a piddling amount of money. That’s a rounding error compared to total AGI, which is over $15 trillion. The U.S. governments spend $16.8 billion every 14 hours.