It's about recognizing how the entire system is stacked against working people and that these ultra-rich pay 0% in taxes, while I pay 30%.
The backbone of this nation is funded by the middle class and the poor being taxed, while the rich externalize their expenses to the government and pay little to nothing in taxation.
If some IRS docs need to get leaked, then so be it. The reporting on this has been pretty responsible.
I am all for a healthy debate on the topic, but I disagree the reporting is responsible. Responsible reporting, in my opinion, would involve nameless "there is a $5 billion Roth IRA out there... the system isn't working", rather than naming private citizens who believe their tax returns from 2005-2020 are private information.
Edit: And I think it may be of public curiosity to know about what goes on in the billionaire class. I get that, to a degree. My original point was that ProPublica is admitting that they are in control of thousands! of American's tax returns for the last decade and a half. There is no guarantee that the IT administrator or summer intern is going to keep that data safe.
Money is power.
Because of the wealth they get to keep, these ultra rich are in many ways ruling the rest of us and turning more and more of us in to their servants, telling us how to run our lives, raise our kids, and what to believe.
Are you ok with that? I'm not.
If you want to claim democracy doesn't work, post some explanation of your position. You might feel like your opinion is shared amd known by everyone, but that's just a social bubble.
I'm more towards your side than you probably think, btw.
Also I don’t hate Bezos or Thiel for playing this game, and I’m not saying you should hate either, but heck I think it’s okay to say at some point, it’d be okay to look at the policy and say okay you made a billion tax free, nice one, but that’s enough we tap out.
And yeah I’d love to divorce business/financial decisions from politics/voting, but you know, Citizens United…
I'd make the taxation retroactive.
From what I understand, the vast majority of Amazon's profit comes not from the e-commerce website but from AWS.
And the overwhelming majority of Bezos' net worth comes from the value of Amazon's stock, does it not?
So aren't the people who are most responsible for his wealth the purchasers of Amazon's stock, not the users of the e-commerce part of the business?
Variety, choice, and a healthy competitive ecosystem are definitely desirable and to be missed with Amazon's dominance, but there are many reasons Amazon is ahead of other e-commerce sites and brick-and-mortar stores.
It'll be interesting to see if/when Amazon finally starts to seriously increase its prices once the rest of its competition are dead and there's no where else for consumers to go.
Will there be a reckoning? Will Amazon be split up?
The voters are told what to believe by the likes of Peter Thiel and Cambridge Analytica, or by the likes of Hearst, Bezos, and Rupert Murdoch owning newspapers.
The rich very often have the ears of politicians, with which (if they don't directly bribe) they can easily have lunch any day of the week to lobby for their special interest, or propose quid-pro-quo plans.
How often does the average voter have lunch with their elected representatives? For almost all of them the answer is never.
The rich also donate to foundations (if they don't own some outright) that lobby the government for their interests, they fund ads to the tune of millions of dollars, they sometimes use millions of their own money to fund their own campaigns for office (Trump being exhibit #1, and Bloomberg #2), etc.
There are plenty of Kleptocrats that aren't concerned with the world being free and fair; they're just happy to sit atop the pile, regardless of what the pile is.
This is not true in the country I live in.
These are such non points. Who cares about the absolute amount? We measure it in points for a reason, and the effective number of points the ultra rich pay is <1, while I pay ~25. You can't denormalize that away.
If we’re collectively being exploited and some publicity is what is effective at change, so be it. I still see the super-rich as individuals, intrinsically no better or worse than anyone else, worthy of empathy, and answerable for their actions, which generally feel unethical.
Where might we cap wealth? What is a better way to go through life than playing the acquisition game and feeling like we’re not adults until we have the fancy, humorless luxury things? How do we otherwise meet the needs of those who thirst for more and more power and resources?
I also think it would be interesting to talk about what it is in this reporting that materially harms Thiel. That he is a billionaire and that he owns PayPal stock was previously public knowledge. This only seems to introduce information about how much tax his Roth is sheltering him from - which the anonymous version of the article would also cover.
This reveal puts his ROTH IRA alone at $5 billion (it owns stock in companies other than PayPal and Palantir)
That is a material change in Mr. Thiel’s privacy.
What does that have to do with anything? I literally have no idea what you're trying to imply.
> these documents prove that these "ultra-rich" pay a large absolute dollar amount of taxes (albeit lower than 30%).
Yes, and they also benefit from the work of society and government many times more than I do! From courts to law enforcement to bailouts to everything else. More generally: these people are not rich in a vaccum, they are only this rich because the rest of society exists, therefore they owe a debt back to society.
Absolute values count for nothing. It's preposterous that I work my ass off and get taxed 30 or 40% and they live off capital gains and get taxed zilch.
It means that government budget can be eventually consistent, unlike our personal budgets. Wealth is a leading indicator of income, and we all know that the vast majority of the ultra-wealthy will eventually pay taxes once they liquidate their wealth. When that happens, they will pay more in taxes than you or I, especially once you factor in inflation (which is one of the reasons why the long-term cap gains tax rate is so low to begin with, everywhere around the world).
Realistically, the government is already spending the money it expects to receive in eventual income tax collections from the ultra-wealthy. The best-faith attack on wealth is mostly around concentration of power, rather than tax revenue or even "fairness" relative to the middle class (the US has by far the most progressive taxation in the developed world[1][2][3]).
[1] https://opportunitywa.org/u-s-federal-income-tax-structure-m...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-fed...
[3] https://faculty.washington.edu/vmenaldo/Inequality%20Researc...
I can't tell if you're serious, I mean it. Can you explain why you say this?
By definition, the ultra-wealthy defer their consumption for the sake of investment. If they never ever choose to liquidate their wealth, then it's little more than a life high score.
One can certainly consume right now by taking on a collateralized loan against their wealth, but even if one were to do that, the loan would need to eventually be repaid. For this to happen, some gain would have to be realized somewhere. That money isn't free. No matter what, that wealth is eventually taxed.
A relevant response to an earlier ProPublica piece: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/propublicas-bombshel...
As for the Roth IRA, the whole point was to extend the power of deferred consumption to the ordinary person (response to this specific ProPublica piece: https://twitter.com/cundillcapital/status/140809068240169370...)
And just a side note: generally assume that I'm being serious. I try to be as earnest as possible on this forum. Going in with this assumption for anyone on here is best for its general health.
Then I have a modest proposal. If the median household net worth[0] in the US is about $120k, and the median household federal tax burden[1] is about $10k per year, then let's say that anyone with a net worth more than $1 billion should pay an annual wealth tax of 10%.
The G7 have already agreed to a global minimum corporation tax rate, so let's make this wealth tax global too, and forbid billionaire residents of non-compliant countries from visiting or passing through countries that implement this tax.
[0] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
I’d support a progressive tax, something like 0 for the first 200,000 or something, then slowly rising to a few percent.
The really tricky thing though is that some assets generate income but others don’t, and we probably don’t want to put even more pressure on people to make rent on their assets than they already have.
So it’s a really hard problem but worth thinking about because taxing capital is really the only way to have a fair tax system in a capitalist society.
It’s a tax with a massive administrative overhead to it.
(Admittedly at the bottom end someone might manage to sneak in under the threshold, making the investigation a waste, but there's no harm in the bureaucrats starting with the richest person and working their way down the list, gaining skills and efficiency as they go).
Even if all the money that the government collects ends up going to pay the investigators, at least that would be creating thousands of decent jobs. Also, assuming a balanced game, if the investigators are being paid $100m to find evidence then the billionaire would have to pay a similar amount to hide evidence, which means they might as well not bother hiding it.
More precisely, the law would require anyone with gross assets above some threshold, say $500m, to report the value of those assets to the IRS every year, based on some simple valuation rules, like "How much did you pay for the asset?" and "What is the market value of those shares / cryptocurrencies?". Only assets worth more than $1m would need to be declared.
Then, as I say, the IRS can go down the list of people with the most assets and do a more thorough audit, to make sure their valuations are correct, while also making sure that there aren't any billionaires who have forgotten to file, since it should be hard to hide that much wealth.
Actually, it's probably the opposite, a Roth is probably a very useful tool for working people as far as savings. For someone starting a Roth at 23 with $6000 and contributing $6000 every year, 10% market average compounded growth, it might be worth around $3M 40 years later. It's not hard to see how Buffett was able to grow his into the tens of millions. I think the Roth IRA is pretty reasonable for wage workers and definitely gives them an edge.
30% of a small number is a lot less than 10% of a massive number. Most definitely PT has paid a multiple of taxes than middle class: millions upon millions of it.
The most common justification is the subscription to the punitive usage of taxes: if someone has money, he should be punished more and more for it.
Maybe you could use another framework and say, how much of taxes and public services do you consume and how much do you contribute. And I assure you people like PT are very much net providers, whereas middle class will very often be a net consumer.
This is disingenuous. ProPublica pointed out that, regardless of the individual transaction, he amassed so much wealth that the .5B in taxes were a drop in the bucket.
PP isn't accusing Musk of cheating the system. They're pointing out that the system is broken.
It’s like looking at a retiree and saying “you only paid $15,000 in taxes, but you have $1M in assets!!” ignoring that those assets were either already taxed or will be taxed in the future.
It’s really a bad article.
1. https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t....
Rather that have the rich also pay 30%, don't you think that it would be better if you too have to pay 0%?
1. We have GOT to close some of these loopholes now that we know what they are and…
2. Someone should go to federal prison for this leak
We can’t undo what we now know about avoiding taxes and we cannot condone egregious invasions of privacy like this.
I understand that the word "If" is doing a lot a work in that sentence, and I have some sympathy for law-abiding billionaires who don't deserve to have their privacy invaded, but they should receive some form of compensation rather than legal punishment of the leaker.
I also don't believe Snowden deserves to be in jail (or rather that he should be pardoned). Sometimes you can't fix things without breaking the law - everyone does it on a daily basis with few consequences (jaywalking, etc). Sometimes it has to be done on a larger scale in order to shed light on injustices - otherwise the power of the few will prevail over the power of the many.