News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
It's such a simple proposal, but I think this might actually be the solution.
It wouldn't. They already run around solutions like this by using proxies, so they are never the official owner of assets they wish to hide from the tax man.
I am all to reform, but this can only ever successfully happen if you target these oligarchs directly and dedicate extraordinary amounts of resources on taking them down and whacking every single loop hole until you finally got them cornered.
This is a never ending cycle.
By shifting the tax to property and away from income tax, you break that cycle.
Elon can have a Panama based LLC that doesn't pay income tax, but that only means he avoids the $25K income tax and loses the $50K tax benefit.
The $10M property tax must still be paid, because it is levied on the properties.
He might be able to then subtract the $10M from his tax obligations in Panama, but for the country where the property resides (e.g. USA), that does not matter.
Unless it isn't in his name, but someone who looks like a working Joe, then it doesn't really matter.
That mode of attack won't work.
Elon could take a risk by putting each property on the name of some homeless person and paying them an income so that the benefit matches the tax savings. It would avoid some tax, but it would also be quite easy for the homeless person to renege on the deal and keep (or sell) the property.
Trying to sue in court would massively backfire, since you'd have to admit in court that you were engaging in tax evasion.
And putting it on the name of some middle class homeowner will have all the same risks, without any tax benefit.
You'll have to be more specific with how you see this failing.
Tax evasion with existing laws works predominantly because the agencies are underfunded and not equipped to track and follow the tax evasion schemes of the ultra rich, while they simultaneously lobby for that to stay that way or become even worse.
No matter the change of code, these issues will not go away, because there's always some way to hide what you have, no matter the laws. While the current state of tax laws (no matter where) is very sub-optimal and heavily favors the rich, there is no way that a mere change in law would change that status whatsoever.
Since I personally do not evade taxes, I couldn't tell you all the loop holes some high powered, high paid professional would find in your proposed scheme, so my assumptions are pretty low level.
Your proposal hinges on even knowing what they own. That's already heavily obfuscated beyond some prestige projects they like to flaunt. I don't think that it would be feasible to enforce finding and knowing what they own, because it's already hidden in layers and layers of proxies, including non-profits, charities, etc.
Okay, so I have to trust your ignorance?
Sorry.
Large scale tax evasion and avoidance happens on capital gains tax and inheritance tax.
Sales tax, property tax and labor income tax are mostly immune, since it is much more difficult to move property or economic activity to Panama and much easier to move ownership of financial assets.
These are well known truths that I am not going to debate or ignore.
How about instead of calling me ignorant you take the opportunity to share your insights? Share some sources for the claims you just made and teach, rather than attack me for not knowing better.
My point is that laws are nearly irrelevant at a certain point of wealth unless they're aggressively enforced specifically against that class of wealthy individuals and companies that are the main culprits in not only evading but also continually eroding tax laws and enforcement. Laws alone do (nearly) nothing to stop any of this.
You literally said you don't know how tax evasion works.
Your words, not mine.
And no, I am not your personal tutor to give you a tax education.
Here is a primer if that's what you want.
https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/educational-resources/primer-not-all-taxes-are-created-equal/
So what? It's the property the owes the tax, is the point. Someone has to pay it. In this case it would be whatever the proxy is.
I'd assume it's a Federally levied property tax, the rebate applied to Federal income. Could be on the basis of the county assessed value of your property though.
You know how the state taxes your income and the feds tax your income? It would be like that but with property instead of income. Your county taxes your property and the feds tax your property. But balanced correctly, you shouldn't be paying more taxes to the fed because they'll cancel out with your income tax.