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It's possible, but usually harder because what makes the uber wealthy uber wealthy is that they own assets rather than have huge income.
So when they say Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Bezos or whoever has "X" billions, they're talking about the value of assets they own (usually large stakes in successful companies) which has more of a parallel with how the middle class talk about their house (an asset) now being worth (whatever). It's not liquid cash.
Taxes on assets are typically realised when those assets are sold or transferred because their value goes up and down and all over the place. And the uber wealthy do pay tax whenever they sell stock because they're buying this mansion or that yacht. It's just usually comparatively small to their full fortune which remains in stock.
So the difficult thing about taxing stock while it's owned is, like I said, the value goes up and down quite dramatically at times. Should the government collect taxes on the buoyant times but then refund them during market downturns? That would be a nightmare. No government wants to be on the hook for refunds during a downturn.
And it can't (I don't think) just collect taxes when super valuable stocks are on the way up because that's not actually cash. It's just the market value if that stock were to be sold. So the most a government could do would be either to receive some of the stock as a tax payment (not much use to a government that wants to spend it) or force the owners of companies to sell stock and make a cash payment just because they're successful.
Which sounds fine on the surface, but this messes up how ownership of companies works. Let's say some good guy CEO (they do exist) has managed the growth of a multi billion business and to do so has brought in investors which now own 49% of the company, and he - the founder - owns 51%. If the company's value on the market rose 20% you'd get news articles about how the founder now has "XX billion" since last year and that they "earn" so many hundreds of thousands a day compared to your average working class person. If the government forced the owner to part with 3% of their ownership of the company in order to pay this "growth tax" then the founder no longer has overall control of the company. It would be 48% founder owner, 49% investors and 3% whoever the government sell the taxed stock to in order to realise a cash value.
So it erodes ownership. Again I'm sure there are plenty reading this who think "so what?". But I can tell you that much of the market value of stock, the reason it has the value it does, is in many cases because the market trusts the management of the ownership of the companies to continue to make profit. If you force the erosion of that just because the company did well then you destroy the way the market trusts and ascribes value to things. Which is why the way governments tax company is via profits and stock sales, where the value is already realised or where the decision to sell is not forced in the same way.
So what to do about this?
Well you can just increase the taxes on stock sale, or on dividend income. But what happens there is you snare the wealthy middle class with the same rope you were aiming at the uber wealthy. Again some might not think that a bad thing, but it's unlikely to be as effective as people would like it to be. You'd generally be raising dividend tax by a percentage point or two on people receiving low six figure sums. Which would get some extra from the Elon Musks, but also would get the same amount from, say, a consultant surgeon, or a recent tech startup founder etc. My point being, there are not huge numbers of these people, compared to the rest of the population that government spending is spread over. The amount you end up raising is not huge compared to what seemed to be on offer when you look at Meta's total net worth or something like that.
The ultimate answer is about ownership. But it has to be organic (personal opinion) so that it doesn't cause disruption to the markets that end up hurting the most vulnerable (via job losses).
And the best way this is done is to simply suck it up and pay a little more for a non mega corp solution to something. Want Bezos to have less of the pie? Stop buying through Amazon just because it's cheaper. Want Gates fortune to be more wide spread? Save yourself a ton of cash by using Linux instead of windows + office licences. Don't like Elon musk? Stop using twitter, don't buy a Tesla.
If you've done all these things I personally think it's as much as you can do. You should put your efforts into making these boycots as easy for others to follow as possible (support your favourite FOSS project) etc. Pay for the online services you like so they don't feel the need to resort to Google ads and on. Unfortunately in a free market such as the ones many of us live in (thinking Western world) the uber wealthy are mainly that because of the millions and millions of micro choices by consumers who are free to go elsewhere but just often don't choose to.
While the ultra wealthy don't have billions on hand, they do take loans against their assets, which we could tax more.
Why? Are any loans ever taxed?
There were tax evasion schemes in the UK where wealthy people could take loans from an offshore entity they contributed to and never pay the loans back. But this was shutdown fairly quickly by HMRC (British IRS) and a bunch of people were fined / went to jail. Don't know if the same is true in America?
If a loan is acting as income (like it does for the ultra wealthy) then it should be treated like income and taxed accordingly.
How do you establish that a loan is or isn't "acting as income"?
Those loans are often several times more than the yearly income and done more frequently.
My mortgage was many times my yearly income.
So then you just have frequency, which is easily gamed by getting fewer larger loans. Maybe one every three to five years? At that point it really is just a mortgage with stock as collateral rather than a house.
Like, you're not wrong in your intuition that the system is problematic. Mine (and others) point is that the devil is in the details, and they're not trivial.
But then the value goes WAAY up. Let's assume you live in a very good house, and mortgage it you're able to get 5 million out of it. Do you think someone like Jeff Bezos could live for 5 years with that?. You can do it fairly straightforward, everytime you take a loan, the full amount of that loan gets added, after a period of 5 years that value disappears, if at any point that value goes above 10 million, you start paying taxes on it. And the higher it goes the more tax you pay on it, just like how income tax has brackets, and just like how up to certain values are exempt.
For you or me if we were ever loan 10 million over 5 years we wouldn't have a way to pay it back. For an Uber wealthy they do that fairly quickly, Bezos mention costs 600k a month, so he'll get into the first bracket from just that in a year and a half.
People need to realize just how big the gap is, there are plenty of ways to tax extremely rich people without affecting the middle class by just putting the bracket so high up that it's impossible for a middle class to reach it.
The problem isn't that i "don't understand the gap". The problem is that this isn't what I'm asking.
How do you define for the purposes of this hypothetical law which loans would be taxed as income?
Telling me how rich Bezos is is completely tangential.
I've been trying to use the Socratic method to prime the pump that
-The root of the problem isn't the loans themselves, it's that they can "realize value" from shares (using them to secure a loan) without selling them.
But that doesn't seem to have gotten anywhere because of how excited people are to hear any question to be somehow a doubting of how rich these guys are?
If that is the case, and you step back, can you consider an alternative strategy besides just some messy spaghetti definition of "income loans" vs other loans?
Read my answer before replying, I provided a solution for that's and it's a solution based on the astonishing difference between what high middle class people and super rich make.
I'll repeat it, every dollar you take from a loan gets tallied, and expires after 5 years. Whenever that value goes beyond 10 million you start paying taxes on the loans. You, or any high middle class person, won't be able to take that many loans in such a short period of time, simply because it would mean that you need at least an income of 2 million per year just to repay those loans, and I think we can agree that's not high middle class.
This way there's no loophole on the type of loan.
This is a bad system for several reasons:
-It requires an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value. Why 10 million? Why not 5? Why not 50?
-it requires an arbitrary time scale. Why 5 years? Why not 3? why not 10? Why not limit once in a lifetime?
We're defining a system here with numbers out of thin air with no context around anything. These are fundamentally badly designed systems. No amount of fiddling with the parameters will make up for the fact that it's fundamentally flawed.
Also, beyond that, you would be amazed how many scenarios exist for people and businesses to secure large loans that this would impact. The goal is to actually tax the super rich who are dodging taxes, not kneecap legitimate useage. You'd hurt hundreds of thousands legitimate borrowers and just shove Bezos and Musk into using alternative mechanisms to leverage their security holdings.
I know you think I don't understand your proposal. I challenge you to consider that I do, and still think you can reconsider the root cause of the issue and come up with alternative ideas. You're stuck on the loan aspect. That's a symptom, not the cause.
Why are tax brackets the value they are? Would you say that tax brackets are a bad system? They also rely on an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value.
Same reason taxes are calculated over yearly income and not every 2 years or 6 months. It's also arbitrary, it's just an arbitrary you're used to so you don't question it.
Both cons you found for my solution are also present on tax brackets, i.e. arbitrarily defined values and length, by that logic you also think tax brackets are a bad idea.
The reason why I said 10 Mil over 5 years is to try to exclude as many legitimate use cases as possible. For starters we're talking about people, not business, there are legitimate reasons for a business, particularly large ones, to take much larger loans. But for people? The largest expense on a regular person's life will be the house they buy, and 10 Mil is WAY above the average price for that, if someone is buying a >10 Mil house I'm okay with them getting taxed on the loan, if they managed to get a 40 year 0% loan (impossible) they'll already be paying 20k per month, might as well pay some more on top of it. But wait, you might say, what about smaller loans that compound to >10 Mil, that's why there's a 5 year limit, this means the person needs to loan over 2 Mil per year, which is simply not possible for someone unless they're mega-rich, because again they would need to be paying >20k per month.
And yes, those are arbitrary values and probably they need adjusting via research and experimentation, but again the same is true for tax brackets, and I think everyone agrees those are a good idea.
This answer you acknowledged my proposal, therefore I now believe that you understood it, on your first answer you suggested I had a definition of income/non-income loans, which is not at all what I'm proposing.
Ok, I'm just going to go ahead and pitch an alternative and then you can weigh in on the relative merits.
In my mind, the issues aren't the loans themselves, it's that they're secured by shares. Billionaires are able to realize real value from those shares without paying taxes in them.
I think if you want to use shares as collateral, you need to pay the taxes on them.
You wanna use shares to back a loan, fine, but the instant you do, all taxes on those shares are due at FMV.
This isn't without precedent: when an employee has unvested shares with a company and meet a companies retirement eligibility criteria, the IRS sees that those shares are "no longer at substantial risk of forfeiture" and several social taxes are due, despite the shares not being sold or even technically owned by that person.
We can extract fair tax values from securities even before they're sold. We already do.
Tax the assets used to secure the loans and it gets the taxes into the system without removing voting rights. Win/win, and it's a scalpel directly targeting the root.
And what exactly is the difference between a loan and a loan acting as income?
Those loans are often several times more than the yearly income and done more frequently.
You don't have to repay income. When you repay the loan should you get the tax back?
The loan was used to evade taxes. Those loans on stocks are effectively turning their stocks into gains and should be taxed as such.