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Comment by koboll | Hacker News Reader

What? He's explicitly saying it will impact him directly.

In dollars, sure, but he’s already giving most of his money away, so it won’t really meaningfully impact him. For decades, Microsoft benefitted from there being no personal income tax, making it easier to recruit employees to its Redmond headquarters. It would have been more meaningful if he came out in favor of the income tax in the 90s, rather than right now.

The key part here is he gets to decide who gets his money and how much.

It won't, and Bill will and has spoken out against any serious proposals to tax wealth, which is a different kind of taxation than an income and even an estate tax.

Seriously this happened only a month ago, how has everyone already forgotten about it?

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/07/taxing-bill-gat...

Whether Bill likes it or not, a wealth tax is likely a non-starter anyway. It's amazing that several candidates are running on a wealth tax when it is pretty likely that it would require a constitutional amendment. Courts already found the carriage tax unconstitutional, which is effectively the same thing.

Are you sure?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylton_v._United_States

I must have misremembered that detail. But I believe the point of what I had read was that a direct tax would be unconstitutional. A carriage tax was found to not be a direct tax apparently. But a general wealth tax likely would be.

Why make such blatantly false statements?

In that article, Bill Gates said that he has paid 10% of his wealth in taxes, and proposed paying 10% more, but expressed concern about paying 90%.

I applaud you for having the chutzpah to link to a source you brazenly misquote.

Allowing the billionaires to set the reasonable taxation rates of this discussion is a testament to how brainscattered people are on this. 10% would still leave an enormous amount of money left over and far more than he would ever need. His great great great grandchildren would still be multi-billionaires.

lol at 10% more. A whopping 20%.

US Federal income tax for 2020 is 24% at $85,525 for a single filer ($171,050).

The long-term capital gains tax rates are 0%, 15% and 20% under the 2018 changes.

Is he proposing a tax on capital gains or income? Where do you think Bill Gates gets his money nowadays?

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