Seems like a sign that taxes are too low.
https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec...
> Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.
"In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes."
between 2014 and 2018, Bezos paid $972 million in total taxes on $4.22 billion of income.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
Please let me know then! 37% top income tax bracket + 15.3% self employment social security and medicare is 52.3% right there! and we aren’t included state or local or other taxes and fees involved in running a business.
It seems people get confused about capital gains taxes vs income taxes. That $927/4220 is almost certainly capital gains taxes.
Among them, you! The people in this article aren’t buying them out of paychecks. Capital gains rates are their worst case scenario.
They’re paying next to nothing into Social Security (remember, only the first $160k income gets taxed there) and they aren’t paying into Medicare (Jobs’ famous $1 salary would result in about a penny).
I know that however unless they are selling assets they will still need to pass through as income.
The idea that capital gains taxes are low is also insane. Those are assets that are being sold. Yes they may have started as worth zero when the company was formed but when they sell stock someone else now owns it. The fact we accept the government is entitled to 15% of that asset value increase is frankly insane.
I’d also like to mention that most people on paychecks are not aware of how much they are being taxed as they believe the absurd euphemistically named “employer” taxes aren’t a tax on them directly. Any tax the employer wouldn’t pay if they weren’t employed is a tax on them, regardless of how you name and collect it. Without payroll collection of taxes there is no way the government would politically get away with the extreme high tax rates on the general populations of western governments.
That capital gains rate - and again, that’s their worst-case scenario here; tricks like the Thiel Roth IRA article I linked elsewhere in this thread - pays for the education, healthcare, protection, etc. of their workforce.
Never actually having to sell shares means no taxes, plenty of operating funds. Quite common. https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidanc...
Scroll down to #2. Thiel, for example, managed to get $5B into a Roth IRA.
> What’s more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.
There are too many tricks available for them to wind up paying a fair share of taxes.
The reality is taxes on everyone are actually crazy high, but hidden from everyone, via “employer” labeling and inflation. One latest euphemistic collectivist scheme is “corporate” taxes, total joke, corporations are investors and employees, every tax is either an investor tax or employee tax, taxing an abstract organizational concept is nonsensical.
Envy is one of the most dangerous human emotions, helping destroy numerous productive societies with collectivist ideas, your war on billionaires is nothing but another envy driven scheme to help collectivists continue to rob the productive members of society.