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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay. If they're abiding by the tax code, they are paying what the law considers "the full amount".

It would not be discriminatory to say "we're going to publicize the returns of anyone who commits tax fraud". It would be discriminator to publicize the returns of anyone the Marxist hive mind thinks should pay more taxes than they are legally required to.

If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail. If they don't "pay their fair share of taxes" but don't commit any crime in so doing, be mad at the people who wrote the tax code.

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There are a million different ways to ascertain "income" to evaluate whether or not a person is paying their "fair share". That we doggedly refuse to do any of them if your income is not subject to payroll taxes is a big reason why people (rightly, I think) don't trust elites.

To be honest, I have no special qualms with businesses doing their level best to minimize their tax obligations, provided they invest in their workers and/or R&D. Its just that they don't. The whole point of the old-timey ridiculously high highest marginal rate was to induce companies to do literally anything else than just pay their top executives more. Higher wages for the rank and file, investment in facilities, R&D, charitable giving, etc etc etc all have far greater impacts on society than the equivalent quantity shipped to the fed as taxes. If the ultra-rich want to avoid paying taxes by instead donating large sums of money to charities with broad socioeconomic impact, I have no problem with that either, for the same reason.

The issue is not that the ultra-rich don't pay their "fair share" (whatever that means), its that the tide that raises their ships does not raise all ships equivalently, and the ways they avoid paying that "fair share" disproportionately benefits only them. I don't really benefit if Jeff Bezos donates a lot of money to Jeff Bezos' nonprofit to manage his art collection or whatever. I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund (or donated it to the March of Dimes or something).

I regularly pay out 20% of my annual income in the form of taxes. Its hard to be super sympathetic to e.g. Elon "I paid $11 billion in taxes last year!" Musk, when most years he pays far far less than that, and his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does.

> I do benefit if he just paid an equivalent amount into the general tax fund

Questionable. Tax receipts that get spent on roads, bridges, other infrastructure that over time increase your and everyone's standard of living? Sure. Funding of boondoggles and sinecures for political allies? Not at all.

> his net worth (as figured by his borrowing potential) grows proportionally a lot faster than mine does

You were talking about income tax, so net worth shouldn't matter, right? And I think you're alluding to the fact that the ultra-wealthy can often temporarily avoid capital gains tax by borrowing against their stock holdings instead for their income; I don't think this matters that much in the end, because it's all taxed anyway. Interest paid to the lender is income to that lender which is taxed, and eventually the bill comes due, at which point shares will have to be sold and capital gains taxes incurred.

Well, no. They have several ways of avoiding the eventual capital gains actually, and that is a legit problem changes to the tax code could fix.

Stepped up basis is one good Google search to explain one way.

Stepped-up basis is weird, I agree. I don't see any good reason for it to stay, other than reducing overall tax burden. On the other hand, I don't see any good reason to be strongly against it, either, other than believing in progressive taxation as a public good. After all, it's not like stepped-up basis only applies to the ultra-rich; it applies just the same to someone who leaves behind a $500k stock portfolio or a dilapidated house worth $75k.

Having said that, upon, say, Elon Musk's passing, his estate would still owe billions of dollars in tax.

Stepped up basis just makes no sense at all. If I get $500,000 in capital gains and realize them, I pay capital gains taxes on them. If, however, I give them to my children when I die, no taxes are paid.

It would be entirely reasonable to put a cap in there if we are concerned about it hurting the middle class and wanted to just be a tax benefit.

The whole idea is that capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes because it comes from something that was already taxed, but that isn’t even true a lot of the time either. As Warren Buffett always says his overall tax bill is still lower than his secretary’s.

It’s not even just the idea that progressive taxes are better, it’s that this is a regressive tax system. One more accurately, and uneven one because two people who make the same money could end up paying very different tax bills throughout their life.

Nobody is asking you to be sympathetic. But we must design ia system, and that system must be (and in fact is) rules based.

The comment to which I was responding was suggesting some mechanism other than the tax code to determine “the full amount”. What is that and why isn’t that just the tax code?

It’s because they’re just determining “the full amount” to be something that makes them feel a certain way which isn’t really a sound basis for law. The full amount is whatever the tax code legally obligates one to pay, no more, and to suggest we should expose people’s private data simply because we don’t like the tax code is preposterous.

> If the rich commit tax fraud, put them in jail.

I feel this doesn't happen as often as it should. I don't even think the IRS is catching enough wealthy tax cheats. The GOP has traditionally cut funding to the IRS which lowers their audit rate and/or limits their audits to those to the less wealthy. (Since going after the really wealthy requires a lot more work.)

I'll add every dollar of IRS funding nets many more dollars of taxes--if we ran the government like a business (for the sake of argument) we should invest a lot more into the IRS. It's free money.

It doesn’t and advocating for that is sensible. Advocating for exposing private data because we don’t feel the amount they paid is fair, even when they’ve not been accused of crime, is not.

The data suggestion was "if unregulated, unelected, unsupervised, and unvetted doge folks get and hoard all this data then we should at least make it public".

I don't know if I agree with that but you're arguing against something else.

Do I blame the wealthy for paying only what’s owed? No.

Do I believe it’s unfair that the wealthy pay a lower effective tax rate than me simply because their income is passive and not wages/salary? Yes.

Do I blame them for perpetuating this state of affairs to the detriment of the nation as a whole? Yes.

Don’t blame them, there aren’t that many of them and we live in a democracy. If we’re dumb enough to keep electing politicians who don’t fix it, that’s on us

Yeah, don't inquire further. What does it matter that these same people also own the news media? We live in a democracy. End of story.

There’s never been more access to information. I can read news about American from Al Jazeera, The BBC, NPR, The Economist, or a wealth of other news stories not owned by rich Americans.

If I vote against my own self-interest it’s my own fault for not knowing better, or because I think something else is more important.

That's just incredibly naive and not representative of the general American voting public.

> But you're just defining the "full amount" as what you think they should pay.

No, I think they're defining it as something like "the tax you would have paid if all your personal revenue that year had been ordinary income". The baseline is not an opinionated criterion, it's what most people deal with.

So if you're a well-off retiree living on long-term investments and don't want your finances public, then, what, you have to donate extra money to the government? Because long-term gains are simply taxed at a lower rate. It's not some kind of special tax-avoidance scheme you can just refrain from doing.

I think most people intuitively group people that have worked their whole lives and living off of their retirement savings and pensions and those that have inherited vast amounts of wealth and haven't worked the differently. Another group would be people that became very wealthy during life due to business, and yet structure their wealth in a way that avoids taxes because the relatively little they need to life their luxuriously life isn't represented as income either.

We know these are different, it also seems quite unfair that their standard of living would be unaffected by higher taxes but poorer people are sometimes disastrously affected.

Great! Let's get transparency and enough people in the irs to ensure everyone is following that tax code! That sounds like a great way to make sure a democratic government based on equal treatment of everyone is doing the right thing according, like you said, to the will of the represented people.

Claiming a deduction does not actually mean you are entitled to that deduction.

I don't know why you're putting the 'Marxist hive mind' in charge, maybe some academics across the political spectrum instead?

I think maybe the point is to shame those using aggressive tax strategies. You can always exploit the law as written, if you put enough money behind the endeavor. It's impossible to write a law that is bullet proof.

There’s a deep strain of inculcated Marxism on the political left and it is very prevalent here. They don’t even know they have it.

If someone thinks that a tax payer who hasn’t even been accused of tax fraud should be punished, and that “the full amount” is one penny more than the tax code dictates, they’re certainly infected. Someone who wasn’t would instead simply advocate for changing the tax code.

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