If it gives you any comfort, I think there were a ton of people who "gave a shit", but were (and in many encounters I've had: still are) just too stupid to realize that "morally withholding" a vote for Kamala was going to enable something incalculably worse.
Those people aren't evil. Just unbelievably stupid. So much so that they're a danger to themselves and others. But not evil.
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.
I genuinely believe that these are the things you find yourself wondering about.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Oof owch owie
It was a fucking ballsy move to advertise their Xmas NFL livestreaming during that trainwreck
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.
They aren't used interchangeably so this implies a different definition or at least distinct connotations.
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?
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.
I don't think I could if they were strangers. I could if one of the recipients was my kid though.