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It's not about disliking the ultra-rich. It's about recognizing how the entire system is stacked against working people and that these ultra-rich pay 0% in tax

It's not about disliking the ultra-rich. 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.

cdolan 5y ago
Government spending is almost entirely leveraged by debt and these documents prove that these "ultra-rich" pay a large absolute dollar amount of taxes (albeit lower than 30%). That is factually non-zero. 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.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "these "ultra-rich" pay a large absolute dollar amount of taxes" 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.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Voters decide, not money. And the rich usually want a free world...
    - andrepd 5y ago
      I don't recall ever reading such a naive statement x)
      - emteycz 5y ago
        I don't recall ever reading such bland, uninteresting statement. 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.
    - joshjdr 5y ago
      I disagree. Many complain about Bezos making billions and not paying a fair share of taxes; yet they support and empower him to further do so with every purchase they make from Amazon. Sure, voters have power voting in occasional elections, but every other day they vote with their dollars—whether they see that or not.
      - dantheman 5y ago
        Notice what the 'fair share' is, is never stated, and at the same time want to encourage behavior via the tax code, but then get mad when people use the incentives.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        joshjdr 5y ago
        I see this article and thread as a general exploration/discussion of these concepts. I’d have suggested we could probably peg ‘fair share’ anywhere between zero and average American tax rate for the sake of this argument, but let’s just go ahead and say 24%. Do you believe an individual should be able to earn billions, and should able to pay less in taxes than individuals making under 100k? If you agree I’ll bet you can find several billionaire (and many more on their payroll) that’d agree. Look, I admit Ive made my share of contributions to the Bezos machine. Now I could vote for Bernie all the while, but ultimately my point in response above is/was that we vote with more than bumper stickers, social posts, and… well, votes. I might be hypocritical, but I’m not mad or delusional. 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…
  - lnwlebjel 5y ago
    > turning more and more of us in to their servants, telling us how to run our lives, raise our kids, and what to believe. This is not true in the country I live in.
- axbytg 5y ago
  > Government spending is almost entirely leveraged by debt and these documents prove that these "ultra-rich" pay a large absolute dollar amount of taxes (albeit lower than 30%). That is factually non-zero 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.
- meristohm 5y ago
  In principle it seems unfair. Case-by-case I have a hard time being against this sort of reporting because of how much influence that money might have. How is it that an individual has so much money? My feeling is that it was enabled in part by tax-funded infrastructure and insufficient government regulation. Too much individualism is trouble (see the USA response to COVID-19). Likewise too much central control. 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?
- aeturnum 5y ago
  I'm pretty open to the ethical version of this article omitting Thiel's name. 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.
  - cdolan 5y ago
    Forbes thought his personal wealth was 2 billion. 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.
- andrepd 5y ago
  > Government spending is almost entirely leveraged by debt 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.
  - bhupy 5y ago
    > What does that have to do with anything? I literally have no idea what you're trying to imply. 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-most-progressive-in-the-world-more-than-offsets-regressively-of-state-local-taxes/ https://opportunitywa.org/u-s-federal-income-tax-structure-m... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-federal-income-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-fed... [3] https://faculty.washington.edu/vmenaldo/Inequality%20Research/European%20Welfare%20State%20Taxes%20more%20regressive%20-%20WSJ%202019.pdf https://faculty.washington.edu/vmenaldo/Inequality%20Researc...
    - andrepd 5y ago
      > and we all know that the vast majority of the ultra-wealthy will eventually pay taxes once they liquidate their wealth I can't tell if you're serious, I mean it. Can you explain why you say this?
listless 5y ago
I think two things can be true at once here… 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.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  If someone brings to light an injustice which prompts the legislature to fix the laws to better match the public consensus of fairness, that seems a perfect example of what the presidential pardoning power is intended for. 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.
  - listless 5y ago
    I think that justice should be blind. Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you aren’t entitled to the same protections. We’ve gotten to a point in culture where some people “deserve it” so it’s ok if bad things happen to them. That feels like a dangerous exception to make.
- machinebun 5y ago
  I believe that if the leak is proven to be in the public interest, no one should go to jail (but that it should be the rare exception). 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.
dane-pgp 5y ago
> these ultra-rich pay 0% in taxes, while I pay 30%. 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/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
- Swenrekcah 5y ago
  A 10% wealth tax is quite a lot but otherwise I agree hat we absolutely need to move from income to wealth tax. 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.
- refurb 5y ago
  Do you know why a number of EU countries had wealth taxes but then got rid them?
  - dralley 5y ago
    Because they pushed the people to other EU countries without them - which wouldn't be true of a global minimum wealth tax.
    - refurb 5y ago
      It wasn’t only that. Setting up the infrastructure to actually measure and track wealth (nice pre-IPO stocks there, how much are those worth? Nothing? How interesting) is a massive undertaking and a bureaucratic mess. It’s a tax with a massive administrative overhead to it.
Manuel_D 5y ago
What country are you talking about? Because in the US the top 1% pay about 40% of taxes [1]. The remaining 2-5% pay 20%. Almost all taxes are paid by people in the top quarter. 1. https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-the-rich-pay-taxes#:~:text=The%20latest%20government%20data%20show,71%25%20of%20federal%20income%20taxes https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t....
- cdolan 5y ago
  Shh that inconvenient truth doesn’t fit the narrative.
dennis_jeeves 5y ago
>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%. Rather that have the rich also pay 30%, don't you think that it would be better if you too have to pay 0%?
cscurmudgeon 5y ago
The fight against the ultra rich usually ends up as a fight against the middle class with some token offensives against the ultra rich.
refurb 5y ago
You mean like when Musk sold $1.5B in Tesla shares and paid $0.5B in taxes (33% rate) but then Propublica complained $0.5B was a small amount of taxes compared to his overall wealth (ignoring the rate for the transaction).
- scep12 5y ago
  > complained 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.
  - refurb 5y ago
    No Propublica was being disingenuous. They note his total wealth, then took a snapshot in time of a single year, where he paid $0.5B in tax, ignoring his actual income of $1.5B 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.
onetimeusename 5y ago
This article is about Roth IRAs and I don't know if Roth IRAs are "stacked against working people". That is because anyone who is working can open up and fund a Roth. I think Peter Thiel's returns are just highly unusual. 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.
conanbatt 5y ago
Its kind of surprising to me how obvious it has become to compare % as more or less instead of absolute numbers. I dont know anything else but taxes that people use this notion. 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.

cdolan 5y ago

Government spending is almost entirely leveraged by debt and these documents prove that these "ultra-rich" pay a large absolute dollar amount of taxes (albeit lower than 30%). That is factually non-zero. 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.

pmoriarty 5y ago
"these "ultra-rich" pay a large absolute dollar amount of taxes" 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.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Voters decide, not money. And the rich usually want a free world...
  - andrepd 5y ago
    I don't recall ever reading such a naive statement x)
    - emteycz 5y ago
      I don't recall ever reading such bland, uninteresting statement. 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.
  - joshjdr 5y ago
    I disagree. Many complain about Bezos making billions and not paying a fair share of taxes; yet they support and empower him to further do so with every purchase they make from Amazon. Sure, voters have power voting in occasional elections, but every other day they vote with their dollars—whether they see that or not.
    - dantheman 5y ago
      Notice what the 'fair share' is, is never stated, and at the same time want to encourage behavior via the tax code, but then get mad when people use the incentives.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - joshjdr 5y ago
        I see this article and thread as a general exploration/discussion of these concepts. I’d have suggested we could probably peg ‘fair share’ anywhere between zero and average American tax rate for the sake of this argument, but let’s just go ahead and say 24%. Do you believe an individual should be able to earn billions, and should able to pay less in taxes than individuals making under 100k? If you agree I’ll bet you can find several billionaire (and many more on their payroll) that’d agree. Look, I admit Ive made my share of contributions to the Bezos machine. Now I could vote for Bernie all the while, but ultimately my point in response above is/was that we vote with more than bumper stickers, social posts, and… well, votes. I might be hypocritical, but I’m not mad or delusional. 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…
- lnwlebjel 5y ago
  > turning more and more of us in to their servants, telling us how to run our lives, raise our kids, and what to believe. This is not true in the country I live in.
axbytg 5y ago
> Government spending is almost entirely leveraged by debt and these documents prove that these "ultra-rich" pay a large absolute dollar amount of taxes (albeit lower than 30%). That is factually non-zero 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.
meristohm 5y ago
In principle it seems unfair. Case-by-case I have a hard time being against this sort of reporting because of how much influence that money might have. How is it that an individual has so much money? My feeling is that it was enabled in part by tax-funded infrastructure and insufficient government regulation. Too much individualism is trouble (see the USA response to COVID-19). Likewise too much central control. 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?
aeturnum 5y ago
I'm pretty open to the ethical version of this article omitting Thiel's name. 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.
- cdolan 5y ago
  Forbes thought his personal wealth was 2 billion. 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.
andrepd 5y ago
> Government spending is almost entirely leveraged by debt 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.
- bhupy 5y ago
  > What does that have to do with anything? I literally have no idea what you're trying to imply. 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-most-progressive-in-the-world-more-than-offsets-regressively-of-state-local-taxes/ https://opportunitywa.org/u-s-federal-income-tax-structure-m... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-federal-income-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-fed... [3] https://faculty.washington.edu/vmenaldo/Inequality%20Research/European%20Welfare%20State%20Taxes%20more%20regressive%20-%20WSJ%202019.pdf https://faculty.washington.edu/vmenaldo/Inequality%20Researc...
  - andrepd 5y ago
    > and we all know that the vast majority of the ultra-wealthy will eventually pay taxes once they liquidate their wealth I can't tell if you're serious, I mean it. Can you explain why you say this?

listless 5y ago

I think two things can be true at once here… 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.

dane-pgp 5y ago
If someone brings to light an injustice which prompts the legislature to fix the laws to better match the public consensus of fairness, that seems a perfect example of what the presidential pardoning power is intended for. 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.
- listless 5y ago
  I think that justice should be blind. Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you aren’t entitled to the same protections. We’ve gotten to a point in culture where some people “deserve it” so it’s ok if bad things happen to them. That feels like a dangerous exception to make.
machinebun 5y ago
I believe that if the leak is proven to be in the public interest, no one should go to jail (but that it should be the rare exception). 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.

dane-pgp 5y ago

> these ultra-rich pay 0% in taxes, while I pay 30%. 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/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

Swenrekcah 5y ago
A 10% wealth tax is quite a lot but otherwise I agree hat we absolutely need to move from income to wealth tax. 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.
refurb 5y ago
Do you know why a number of EU countries had wealth taxes but then got rid them?
- dralley 5y ago
  Because they pushed the people to other EU countries without them - which wouldn't be true of a global minimum wealth tax.
  - refurb 5y ago
    It wasn’t only that. Setting up the infrastructure to actually measure and track wealth (nice pre-IPO stocks there, how much are those worth? Nothing? How interesting) is a massive undertaking and a bureaucratic mess. It’s a tax with a massive administrative overhead to it.

Manuel_D 5y ago

What country are you talking about? Because in the US the top 1% pay about 40% of taxes [1]. The remaining 2-5% pay 20%. Almost all taxes are paid by people in the top quarter. 1. https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-the-rich-pay-taxes#:~:text=The%20latest%20government%20data%20show,71%25%20of%20federal%20income%20taxes https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t....

cdolan 5y ago
Shh that inconvenient truth doesn’t fit the narrative.

dennis_jeeves 5y ago

>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%. Rather that have the rich also pay 30%, don't you think that it would be better if you too have to pay 0%?

cscurmudgeon 5y ago

The fight against the ultra rich usually ends up as a fight against the middle class with some token offensives against the ultra rich.

refurb 5y ago

You mean like when Musk sold $1.5B in Tesla shares and paid $0.5B in taxes (33% rate) but then Propublica complained $0.5B was a small amount of taxes compared to his overall wealth (ignoring the rate for the transaction).

scep12 5y ago
> complained 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.
- refurb 5y ago
  No Propublica was being disingenuous. They note his total wealth, then took a snapshot in time of a single year, where he paid $0.5B in tax, ignoring his actual income of $1.5B 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.

onetimeusename 5y ago

This article is about Roth IRAs and I don't know if Roth IRAs are "stacked against working people". That is because anyone who is working can open up and fund a Roth. I think Peter Thiel's returns are just highly unusual. 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.

conanbatt 5y ago

Its kind of surprising to me how obvious it has become to compare % as more or less instead of absolute numbers. I dont know anything else but taxes that people use this notion. 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.