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Some Rich Americans Are Getting Stimulus ‘Checks’ Averaging $1.7M
- golergka 7y agoThey are not getting anything from the US government – they pay less taxes. This article tries to make a case a if it was the same thing. It is not.
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- throwaway483284 7y agoIn both cases there is 1.7 mil dollars less in public budget, I don't see how this is different.
- maerF0x0 7y agoIt's different based on how you view income. Many conservatives view income as "earned" and then taxes as appropriation ("taken away"). Under such a perspective it is only a return of what was originally theirs in the first place. This country is run on deficits/debt so 1.7M less from rich people is not marginally 1.7M less to poor people.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoPeople also argue that the earth is really flat, that tax reductions always pay for themselves, and your comment is equivalently powerful to those.
- testbot123 7y agoI.E., the same people who have benefited from (and whose wealth was probably grown in) a social system where utilities, infrastructure, schools, etc are paid by tax dollars.
- nabla9 7y agoPaying taxes and tax deductions are economically equivalent.
- nathanvanfleet 7y agowow amazing
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoIf anyone pays a million less in taxes then someone gave them a million dollars back. so yes, you are giving them something. One can argue in some irrational way that taxes are theft so you never 'give' someone something if you reduce their taxes. At the end of that game, you have more money than you had before, gift or other political arguments aside. Someone who was going to pay a million in taxes and now has 1 mil less is not going to put their money into the economy the same what that 1000 people with moderate income, like say restaurant workers getting $1,700 would. Those people poorer will spend all that money. I'm fortunate to be a well compensated software engineer, and I pay a huge amount of taxes. I'm not out there begging for more money (via tax reductions) and then claiming it was already my money, not a gift. That's a dishonest argument.
- WalterBright 7y ago> is not going to put their money into the economy the same what that 1000 people with moderate income, like say restaurant workers getting $1,700 would. Those people poorer will spend all that money. Wealthier people spend or invest all of their money. Only drug dealers hoard cash, and that's only because they have difficulty laundering it.
- youngtaff 7y agoPoorer people spend all their money - they have no choice…
- WalterBright 7y agoOnly fools hoard cash. Nobody has a Scrooge McDuck cash vault.
- noahtallen 7y agoIt doesn’t seem hard to argue that purchasing stocks or expensive real estate is not as beneficial for the economy as thousands of people spending the same amount in their local economies.
- aaomidi 7y agoLemme guess, are you one of these people? If so - lol for now. If not, why is this mental gymnastics?
- mywittyname 7y ago>because of additional language that applies the policy retroactively “so losses in 2018 and 2019 can be ‘carried back’ against the past five years.” Damn, must be nice.
- andrei_says_ 7y agoSurely this is what I’m paying taxes for. Could go to healthcare for all, fixing my roads and access to education, creating a strong resilient nation for all of us. But this is so much better.
- cultus 7y agoThis is what an oligarchy looks like.
- andrei_says_ 7y agoWouldn’t it be nice to have “oligarch-democrat” as explicitly stated as “social-democrat”? Everywhere a candidate’s name is printed.
- mattkrause 7y agoIndeed, each of these checks would pay for a staff scientist (at the NIH or a research university) for the next few decades. Or a teacher. And arguably, had we done that then we wouldn't be dealing with this now.
- threatofrain 7y agoThis article is a summary of the original: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/14/coronavirus-law-congress-tax-change/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/14/coronavir...
- brenden2 7y agohttps://archive.is/cucsR https://archive.is/cucsR
- cryptica 7y agoAs soon as I heard that the Fed was going to do a cash injection. I knew that covid-19 was just a pretext. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22560017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22560017 And now we're seeing article after article just proving me right.
- fortran77 7y agoLandlords who took big losses from tenants who didn't or couldn't pay their rent and suffered a loss will be able to deduct more of their loss from their personal income tax.
- verbify 7y agoThe reason why you get better yields from being a landlord or investing in shares than from keeping it in the bank is because you also accept risk. These people accepted the risk, and their reward during normal times is a better yield. By bailing them out (and specifically only the ones who also get income tax)
- smcl 7y agoIt seems they also got a reward during the tough times
- briandear 7y agoIt’s one thing to make a profit or a loss, it’s another thing when a government forces you to take a loss to subsidize someone else. If there was a risk that you’d be forced by the government to take huge losses then that risk should be priced into the rent — which means future rents will have to be much higher to accommodate the increased risk. Imagine if a grocery store were required to give free food to everyone at the command of the government. Who covers that expense? The shopkeeper? Any shops that managed to survive would have to jack up future prices to recover their loss. The risk of the government taking away your inventory and giving it away uncompensated is unprecedented. You can’t evict and you can’t collect rent because of a government decree — that’s effectively a seizure of property which is illegal without due process. Even eminent domain requires fair compensation to the property owner. If you accept this as acceptable, then what’s to stop the government from taking all of your income and giving it away? Why is your income supposed to be safe from seizure but someone else’s isn’t?
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- xenospn 7y agoI'm assuming that's by design.
- darawk 7y agoThis is a pretty reasonable thing to suspend at a time when landlords are essentially forgiving huge amounts of rent. It's super reasonable that they be able to deduct those losses on their taxes in an unlimited fashion.
- frenchman99 7y agoOnly if they don't request to be paid back later for said rent. Otherwise, that's just giving rich people free money.
- wmf 7y agoPeople who can't pay rent now are unlikely to be able to ever pay it back later. It's probably better for everyone to just write it off.
- cultus 7y agoThat would probably be better, but isn't happening. I think these landlords should have planned ahead and had six months of emergency funds saved up, just like McDonald's employees are supposed to.
- verbify 7y agoDefinitely, that would be a better outcome. However the rent isn't being forgiven - it will possibly be sold to a collections agency, who would hound the renter to get something back from some of the renters.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoIf they get it later, what's the loss they get to claim on their taxes?
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- lend000 7y agoIf I am understanding this correctly, there is no money flowing to rich Americans, but they will have additional opportunities to deduct losses on their 2020 taxes (basically paying less in taxes after a major stock market rout) that would normally need to be spread over future tax returns indefinitely. However, this will only occur if they took losses, so it is really a discount of ~35% on negative income. This would also apply to someone who is not rich, i.e. a software dev sole proprietor who cashed out big losses in March in the stock market and then applied those losses against their normal income to end up reporting 64k in income instead of 100k (normally 36k in losses would have to be stretched over 12 years of tax returns). I understand this doesn't fit the narrative, but please comment if it is incorrect instead of downvoting.
- president 7y agoSomething really needs to be done about downvote brigading on HN. At least people should be required to provide a reason for the downvote.
- jimbob45 7y agoI've wondered if a five-a-day downvote limit would benefit HN.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoOr just make it cost karma. Anyone that down-votes too much would wind up at the threshold for down-voting and be rate limited by their ability to make up-voted comments. It would also render ineffective the strategy of having a bunch of accounts with enough karma to downvote and using those accounts all at once to make comments you don't like dead (the presence of corporate or state controlled accounts employing this strategy has been suggested multiple times).
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- anm89 7y agoEdit for definitional clarity: My use of the term socialism here is exactly equivalent here to the term "systems that enable wealth redistribution through legislation" no more, no less. Im not commenting on anything like the ownership of the means of production in society or anything like that. It seems like the whole world is chomping at the bit to enact more socialism but do you think it's homeless people and cashiers that are defining the rules of the system and legislation? Of course not, it's lawyers and politicians. So are you really naive enough to believe that they write perfectly fair legislation that doesn't favor their interests at all? Friedrich Hayek nailed this on the head almost 100 years ago. The problem with socialism isn't that its not an admirable goal, it's that even if you want it, by nature you aren't going to get the version of it that you wanted, you are going to get the version of it the a bunch of politically connected insiders design and while they may not be totally self serving, they are usually going to figure out how to be on the winning end of the game. Crass said it well: "But no one ever changed the church by pulling down a steeple And you'll never change the system by bombing number ten Systems just aren't made of bricks they're mostly made of people" The systems you get are the ones the people who design them make. Thinking otherwise is foolish. The people who should be the most scared of redistribution systems like this are the ones who want to look out for the interests of the little guys.
- admiral33 7y ago"The people who should be the most scared of redistribution systems like this are the ones who want to look out for the interests of the little guys." - Interesting, can you elaborate?
- anm89 7y agoIt's a system of wealth redistribution. The problem is, when these systems are gamified by lawyers and people in the financial world, and they win, the wealth ends up being redistributed in the opposite direction as many people intended and the little guys lose. Looking at the 10 years following the great recession it looks like this is what happened (although those redistributions were more explicitly directed towards the top of the pyramid upfront) but look at at how inequality statistics have moved since that event. It certainly doesn't seem to have favored those who are financially disenfranchised in our society. The problem is the nature of society permanatly skews these events in the favor of the the people who have the most existing resources to figure out how to game the system. If you want a much more in depth breakdown of how that happens structurally, read Hayeks the road to serfdom as I mentioned above.
- refurb 7y agoIt found that, “82 percent of the benefits of the policy go to about 43,000 taxpayers who earn more than $1 million annually.” Why is that surprising? The people that pay the most tax have the most benefit from a tax break. It's no different than saying a family making $30,000 per year don't benefit from tax breaks, but leaving out the fact they don't pay any tax anyways.
- rgc1106 7y agoUnfortunately, this isn't even slightly surprising. Tax breaks is essentially the de facto way the country rewards the rich as it's not 'giving handouts' (but it is).