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Unfashionable thought: pay your damn taxes. Loopholes are one thing and IMO should be closed but morality is another. The whole idea that you can make a billio

• maxehmookau 4y ago
• jen729w 4y ago
  I was going to say that this article should be titled “how to steal from society”, so I’ll join you in downvote-city, comrade.
  • tlb 4y ago
    "How to take money from society whose elected representative set up a specific program to hand out" Which I also refuse to take, myself, but for different reasons than refusing to steal.
    • mschuster91 4y ago
      Intent matters. Opportunity Zones are set up to incentivize actual businesses providing services to the local community, not to serve as vehicles for far-away rich arseholes to cheat money out of the taxman.
      • mcv 4y ago
        But if the rules don't enforce that, and allow far-away rich arseholes to use these zones to cheat money out of the taxman, then that's sloppy legislating. The loopholes need to be closed. Relying on the goodwill of people whose primary unifying characteristic is the hoarding of extreme amounts of money is a bad idea.
        • mschuster91 4y ago
          The problem is a fundamental disadvantage in available manpower. Billionaires employ literal armies worth of extremely well paid lawyers, accountants and other professionals continuously working on finding and exploiting loopholes involving multiple jurisdictions, whereas most of the public services sector is barely keeping up. (Yes I'm aware that especially at the federal scale, the ultra rich sometimes outright buy special tax breaks, but that's not the case we're talking about) The solution would be to allow punishing breaking the intent of a law, but given how politicized even the justice system is these days, I'm not so sure if that's a good idea either.
          • lukas099 4y ago
            The solution is tax reform. Make taxes and social programs broad and simple.
          • sokoloff 4y ago
            If you could specify the intent in a way that could be adjudicated, why couldn’t you just write the law better in a different dimension? “This applies only up to $X M/yr” or whatever. Having someone later come along and try to devine what the “true intent” was and levy punishments for behavior clearly allowed by the law but against an imputed intent sounds worse for society based on laws than the avoidance of some taxes via a poorly written law.
        • ericmay 4y ago
          I agree and disagree. I agree that it’s sloppy legislation and to that end the group to blame is the government (and ultimately the people). But I disagree that if the rules don’t get enforced that it’s seemingly “ok” for people to exploit it. They should have common decency and ethical guidelines here. Probably why I’m not one of them.
          • mcv 4y ago
            I didn't say it was ok to exploit it. I say it's unavoidable that people will exploit it. I do wish we could run society purely on goodwill and people's intrinsic morality, but we've got a society that pushes people to crave more and more wealth, and those two don't go together.
      • more_corn 4y ago
        But the rules require that work be done in the area, that property be improved, that gains be reinvested in the area. Rich arseholes who never set foot in the area can still pour buckets of cash into areas WE DECIDED need it most.
  • lukas099 4y ago
    Reducing your taxable income is stealing? So if I contribute to a Roth IRA, I am stealing too?
    • ericmay 4y ago
      Depends on the spirit of the reduction and income levels. A Roth IRA was designed specifically for wage earners to have a tax-friendly investment vehicle to save for retirement. This benefits them and society. I don’t think you can say the same thing about the OP here.
      • chii 4y ago
        > This benefits them and society. I don’t think you can say the same thing about the OP here. The OP is given a tax incentive to build businesses in depressed economic zones and low-income areas. Both roth ira and this special tax "loop hole" are incentives the gov't implemented to encourage a beneficial behaviour.
      • refurb 4y ago
        The 401k was a literal tax loophole - it was never intended to be a tax-deferred retirement vehicle. Some accountant just noticed it in the tax code and figured that most Americans could actually take advantage of it. https://www.northwesternmutual.com/life-and-money/your-401k-when-it-was-invented-and-why/ https://www.northwesternmutual.com/life-and-money/your-401k-... I assume you're sticking to your morals and don't use the 401k loophole?
      • lukas099 4y ago
        The spirit of the tax benefit, like all tax benefits, was to help some special interest avoid their taxes.
    • HWR_14 4y ago
      I'd say if you did what Theil did and use your Roth to purchase your own startup, yes. If you use it to play the market or invest in index funds, no.
  • more_corn 4y ago
    I really think the opportunity zones were created for precisely the purposes described in the article. We’ve made a strategic decision to forego taxes in certain areas in order to incentivize investment in poor (traditionally minority) areas. The rules were created specifically so that people would use them. It would rise to the level of cheating if you abuse the rules. Investing in an opportunity zone, starting a business there, improving property, employing people, re-investing there. These are all the intended effects of opportunity zones. It seems like an awesome loophole, but it’s not. The hole was put there deliberately. It’s meant to be used. If you’re curious, take a tour of your nearest opportunity zone. Imagine starting a business there. Imagine your employees shopping at the bodega on the corner, grabbing lunch on the street, using the run-down auto repair shop because it’s convenient. If you’re willing to locate your business in an area we’ve decided we want revitalized you can realize tax benefits. But there’s some risk, so do it with open eyes.
• epistasis 4y ago
  This isn't a loophole as much as a completely designed tax break. That's a different deal than some body squeaking around tax law; this was all about trying to change parts of the nature of capitalism's tendency to rerun money to capital more than to labor. If you think it's misguided, I do too. Though I think it's good to invest in under invested areas, I also think we need to counteract the effects of the Henry George Theorem and also redistribute money from the land rents to people that do not own land. Both are necessary to try to make our economic system more fair and more efficient. The fewer people that are allocating capital in capitalism, the worse it works. And pretty much all positive defenses of capitalism start with assumptions that most people are starting from somewhat similar places of wealth, or at least enough wealth that they are not destitute. Until we have that base level of security for all, we need things like massive redistribution, which includes carrots like opportunity zones, as well as sticks like taxes on land and monopolies.
  • diob 4y ago
    Capitalism these days feels akin to joining a game of monopoly where everything has already been purchased. But feel free to have a jolly time going around the board and paying rent :)
    • doovd 4y ago
      Well, monopoly was introduced as satire in the first place in fact! A way to showcase some absurdities of capitalism
      • epistasis 4y ago
        Not exactly a critique of capitalism, but of private land ownership. The Landlord Game was created by a Georgist, and Georgists consider land and capital to be entirely different economic factors with entirely different behaviors. Marxists often consider Georgism to be capitalism's last gasp.
    • midasuni 4y ago
      That was the whole point for monopoly, to show how rigged the system is.
• ggm 4y ago
  This is HN. we welcome diversity of views. this view you espouse, is not actually a minority view, but still, its a divisive topic. I'm a high tax kinda guy. If we all had Norway taxes, we'd have Norway sovereign fund and EV and lifestyle (but maybe without SAD, because we're not all that far north)
  • tnr23 4y ago
    Norway oil is way more relevant for your thesis than Norway taxes
    • kmonsen 4y ago
      So does Texas and Alaska, and even California?
      • mcv 4y ago
        Doesn't Alaska provide a small basic income for its citizens funded by oil revenue?
    • tanto 4y ago
      Yea right, so is the German oil for Germany. /s You seem to be quite the expert on Norway. Can you elaborate how they prop up social services with oil money?
      • CurleighBraces 4y ago
        I believe the parent comment is referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
      • emteycz 4y ago
        Lol, don't speak about high taxes if you don't even know how Norway and oil go together...
        • 4y ago
• bojangleslover 4y ago
  Infrastructure is just a sliver of the fed budget. Education is funded by property taxes, also a sliver. "History" and "societal background" has absolutely not been "paid for by taxes". If every working American contributed $8,000 in taxes we would have the same revenue as the insanely progressive system we have now. I don't think anyone here would advocate for zero taxes. I think they would simply advocate for less taxes.
  • hamter 4y ago
    someone who has a billion dollar exit is in a somewhat better position to pay those taxes than a person scraping by on minimum wage. What you seem to be advocating for here is not less taxes but pushing the taxes downward to people who can less afford them. Maybe instead the federal government could do inventive things like substantially cut the military budget.
  • pcrh 4y ago
    >If every working American contributed $8,000 in taxes we would have the same revenue You're not arguing for lower taxes; you're arguing for higher taxes on the poorest.
• doovd 4y ago
  businesses yes. But governments abuse public spending - at least in the UK a significant chunk gets funnelled to conservative friends and family...why should I therefore want to fund that?
  • CraigJPerry 4y ago
    Why would a desire to pay less tax on your part influence a government’s misappropriation of the public purse? That’s what voting is for surely?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • doovd 4y ago
      Abuse of taxes is not a party-specific issue. Until laws are passed to prevent this (which is probably a multi-decade lobbying effort), it will re-occur. In the meantime, it's probably reasonable to be sour about paying taxes when it's subject to this practice by the receiver.
    • Nextgrid 4y ago
      Voting only works if there are good options out there. If both options are equally crooked, there's no solution.
  • cassepipe 4y ago
    Seems like you need and try to convince people around you to vote for a party that wants high taxes on the rich (that include wealthy politicians), transparency on public expenses, public data on politicians resources, democratic control/revocation of elected representatives/public servants ? And forbid money owned medias by controlling their finances too ? There are only two ways to take down an oligarchy, a revolution and its unavoidable oligarchic backlash with the help of antidemocratic violent forces or use of the Democratic tools that the oligarchy had to concede throughout the accidents of history to divide it further and reinforce democracy. You will find it is quite hard though.
• gonzo41 4y ago
  Have an upvote, I don't understand greed, why wouldn't you want to be in the fortunate position of having to pay CGT, it means things are going well.
• grecy 4y ago
  I agree with you personally, but really what we're talking about is playing sport against a team that continually bends and exploits the rules and comes out ahead. You can talk all you want about morality, but the facts are the facts. Corporations have been doing it for decades, and anyone that doesn't do the same will continue to be taken advantage of.
• kmonsen 4y ago
  This is not finding some mysterious loophole though, but using a government designed program. I think it is sad they exist, but clearly they are there to be used.
• systemvoltage 4y ago
  Can we also simultaneously hold the government accountable for efficient spending of the money? I want 2x better government services for the same amount of taxes. The fact that no one questions government efficiency, but everyone is eager to pay taxes is delusional. If I lived in Zurich or Tokyo, yes, I am happy to pay taxes. I really don't want to give a dime to Oakland local government and California in general; I will do everything in my power and exercise all legal avenues to pay as little tax as I can.
  • ramraj07 4y ago
    Pay your tax first (a fair share at that) and then harp about unfair spending.
    • manigandham 4y ago
      What is a fair share? And what's the point of giving even more money to an entity that wastes most of it? You position is irrational and seems to be from a place of envy over other's wealth than actual societal benefit.
    • systemvoltage 4y ago
      Have been. For years. I see dwindling QoL, infrastructure on stilts, power outages, anti-small-business bureacracy, woke government initiatives and dysfunctional law enforcement where I live. I give my local and state government a solid 2/10 score. I am a socialist where governments are efficient, liberatarian where governments are dysfunctional.
      • ABCLAW 4y ago
        >I am a socialist where governments are efficient, liberatarian where governments are dysfunctional. At first glance this position seems reasonable, but ultimately it's short sighted - the game is iterative. Penalizing the public coffer ultimately results in higher costs over the long run as high ROI investments are left on the planning table. The attitude itself is a large part of why the American government is paralyzed and cannot effectively address issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
• KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
  I have an idea. I'll pay my damn taxes if you'll pay back your government-sponsored student loan. Deal?
  • richbell 4y ago
    > I have an idea. I'll pay my damn taxes if you'll pay back your government-sponsored student loan. Deal? What exactly are you trying to say here?
  • ketzo 4y ago
    1) insane false equivalency 2) please don’t build straw men 3) please don’t be so combative
  • rocgf 4y ago
    This is such a common error in judgement, but I don't really know its name. Does anyone know? I'm genuinely curious. I'm referring to the "I'll do X when others do Y" type of reasoning.
    • lordgrenville 4y ago
      > Does anyone know? Sounds a bit like whataboutism.
  • TomSwirly 4y ago
    You didn't really need to make that comment - the whole KKK thing speaks for itself.
• whitepaint 4y ago
  You want to tell me when you do your taxes with your accountant you don't try to pay as little taxes as legally possible?
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    Mostly I just apply the straightforward rules until it seems fair. I don’t go making a seperate company to invest in a different company to hire workers in a specific area so that I can later pay zero taxes on capital gains. Honestly, the level of bother is too much to keep track of for 20%, which is already really low.
    • lukas099 4y ago
      Is it fair to contribute to a Roth IRA? Is it too much bother? Where do you draw the line?
• TrackerFF 4y ago
  Honest to god, I'm kind of stunned by the people with tens to HUNDREDS of millions, liquid, that will go great lengths to avoid, even evade, taxes. You see people move to other countries for "tax purposes" alone. Or people that will create elaborate schemes. Of course, I understand that if you're in that wealth bracket, the actual tax/accounting acrobatics is abstracted from you. You probably hire some consultant to do all the work, and in the day only pay a fee to get your tax cut by x.xx%. That's zero work for you, minus whatever time you spent on a meeting with the consultant. But still, there are people that will be heavily involved in these things themselves. Yes, it is a polarizing topic. Some people refuse to pay taxes because of how the money is spent - or they have some idea of how the money is spent. But from a pragmatic point of view...what's the difference between sitting on say $500MM in cash, and $800MM? It's either way going to be more money than you'll ever be able to spend. Hell, even the safest investments at that scale will yield more money than what most CEOs make in a year. (With that said, I do have sympathy for the people living in countries where you have to pay wealth tax or tax on unrealized gains, which for founders means 1) taking out loans to pay taxes 2) increasing their yearly compensation, just to meet their tax burden or 3) to sell their equity But these aren't really in the "exit" bracket)
  • popcorncowboy 4y ago
    > what's the difference between sitting on say $500MM in cash, and $800MM? At least $15M a year over most 3 year horizons, or the insane compounding effect of $300M invested over the long haul. Your question makes sense from a "normal" perspective, but doesn't once you're UHNW [0]. > It's either way going to be more money than you'll ever be able to spend. Not even close. At UHNW levels there are whole classes of things to "spend" on that ramp pretty quickly into 8, 9, 10+ figure values. Influence, power, status, prestige, legacy, ideology, politics, rinse, repeat. And the UHNW "brackets" are a real thing (you're either in the tres commas club or you're not, etc). Sure, pay your taxes. But once you crack these numbers there are entire industries dedicated to helping you work the system, and it's unfortunately pretty workable (because there are substantial interests lobbying to make/keep it so). [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_high-net-worth_individual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_high-net-worth_individua...
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  When people pay their taxes, they pay for politicians to come up with more ridiculous schemes like this, and more civil servants to administrate them forever.
• mellavora 4y ago
  My brother's life was paid for by taxes. Went to the ER with a headache, turned out to be a brain annurism leading to 2 8rh plus surgeries and a month in the hospital. Bill was paid out of Minnesota state taxpayers fund. Otherwise he would have been bankrupt for life -- and without the surgery that life would not have been long. My wife's life was saved twice by tax-funded health care. Won't share details here. I happen to enjoy quite a few government services. Like "roads". I'm happy to pay taxes. I don't always like the way they are spent. I also don't like everything about my job, and if I had a dog I could probably find things about it that I didn't like. Life is compromise.
  • lukas099 4y ago
    It makes sense that people who benefit disproportionately from social spending would be pro-social spending, and vice versa for people who pay disproportionately more into the system. It troubles me to see comments here acting like the rich are all sociopaths, when really, everybody rich and poor is generally going to favor what is in their own best interests.
    • karmakurtisaani 4y ago
      It troubles me to see apologist comments here for ultra wealthy tax avoidance.
      • lukas099 4y ago
        Everybody avoids taxes to the maximum extent allowed. It is ubiquitous and expected.
        • karmakurtisaani 4y ago
          You can literally defend almost any action by the argument that they are just maximizing their gains. Clearly they are. Should we roll over and accept it?
    • MisterBastahrd 4y ago
• mcv 4y ago
  Still, if the tax loophole exists, it's hardly surprising that people use it. People should pay their taxes, but the government should also close these tax loopholes, or at least be a lot more strict about how they're used; I can imagine these opportunity zones exist to make it more attractive to set up shops and small businesses here in order to develop the area. It's not meant for app startups with billion dollar exits, so the rules should exclude those.
  • lukas099 4y ago
    > It's not meant for app startups with billion dollar exits, so the rules should exclude those. Adding more rules is generally favorable to the rich. The real solution is removing special-interest tax benefits like this in the first place.
• golergka 4y ago
  > The whole idea that you can make a billion dollar business without being hugely dependent on the infrastructure, education, history, societal background etc that has largely been paid for by...taxes...is utter fallacy. Taxation is not a transaction you enter voluntarily; it's enforced by violence, and all these rationalizations don't matter as you don't have any choice anyway. So, taxation is either extortion, robbery or theft (I'm not sure which definition matches it better), and tax evasion is simply a moral obligation for everyone who believes that people should not be subject to violence.
  • orra 4y ago
    > Taxation [is] enforced by violence... taxation is either extortion, robbery or theft Perhaps, but less so than money. People wouldn't recognise other people as having millions or billions of wealth unless that was enforced through the violence of state capitalism, and a legal system protecting banks, creating cops and prisons. Why would they? Millionaires aren't a natural concept; it's something our society allows.
    • golergka 4y ago
      Justice (in any possible variety except “might is right”) isn't a natural concept too; it's something our society allows. You could also say that justice is a “social construct”. So what? Does it mean that it's something not valuable or desirable? I don't think so.
      • orra 4y ago
        The legal system is primarily a legal system, not a justice system. Mainly, however, I am pointing out how absurdly reductionist it is for you to say “taxation is violence”. As you say, social constructs—taxation perhaps—can be “valuable or desirable”.
  • ABCLAW 4y ago
    >So, taxation is either extortion, robbery or theft If ultimate enforcement through violence is the only determinant of whether or not something is a crime, then the very laws that dissuade other crime, say the robbery or theft that you refer to, are themselves blackmail, extortion or some other variation of violent crime. This circular reasoning does not hold up to scrutiny, which is why it is almost only used in respect of taxation in libertarian circles and nowhere else.
• devoutsalsa 4y ago
  As an American, I'd be more excited about taxes if I had access to affordable education, affordable healthcare, a well maintained infrastructure, and general social safety net. Now that I'm living outside of the USA & still subject to USA taxation, I'm even less excited about it.
  • TomSwirly 4y ago
    Take heart - I filed Dutch taxes in 2021 and not American, for the first time! It's somewhat more but every single day I see the results of my taxes.
• mrtksn 4y ago
  I agree completely but it seems to be a game theory thing. It works better if everyone is happy but you can leech the system and disproportionally benefit of it without doing your part for it as long as the system does not collapse due to your actions. I guess the worlds has some space for people who can be rewarded enormously through the work of the long tail and everything collapses when the number of people who act in that way passes the acceptable threshold. Like, it's O.K. to have a royal family and bunch of elites around them who engage only in high life stuff like poetry, paintings and politics but you can't have half of the population be painters, poets and the other half work the land and have no life so to feed the elite half. I think there was article on HN some time ago about the tolerable percentage of knights in the society.
• caslon 4y ago
  I generally agree with you, but I think your reasoning is partially nonsense. I haven't benefit very much from government infrastructure. Woo, we have roads now. Where multiple of my family members have died, and most of my family members have been traumatized by those deaths. The person who raised me nearly died in one, and it left us even further in the poverty trap than we otherwise would have been, because of millions of dollars in hospital bills, even with insurance, thirty years ago, that we spent decades paying off. Oh, internet? I had dial-up growing up in the 2000s because my local government sucked and the wider governments sucked. Honestly, my education sucked. It was actively harmful to my development. Government incentives historically kept my family in poverty, leaving my societal background awful, and filled with terrible people. And, on top of all of that, every two years, there's a 50% chance that a government I despise becomes in charge. Even when a government I find tolerable is in charge, more goes to funding wars than anything I genuinely care about. "Billionaires aren't paying fair taxes!" becomes a campaign point, rather than anything that could genuinely help people, because no politician is interested in fixing things. The one thing that is unambiguously good about the US government, the Postal Service, has been getting slowly dismantled and made inefficient over the last decades. Evading taxes is the only morally correct thing to do in America. I'm not going to evade them, because I'm not a moral person and prefer the convenience of not being randomly investigated by the IRS. We should tax billionaires and companies because billionaires and companies suck. That's the valid reason. Cloaking it in false-utilitarianism is nonsense. Taxation should be punitive.
• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I live in a former socialist country, and I hate the "we will tax the rich" (as in higher tax percentages) paroles I hear from our current left-leaning (even communist) parties here. Why? (and I have mentioned this before, many times, even here) Poor people already pay almost zero taxes. Rich people avoid paying taxes at all. And me, someone with an above average but below "rich" (engineers) paycheck get fucked by the taxes. I don't want higher taxes for the rich, I just want the rich to pay the same tax rate as I do in the first place.
  • fifticon 4y ago
    given that they often precisely pay less taxes than you, you can't really avoid wanting them to pay "higher" taxes - higher than the ridiculously low numbers they pay, given their army of lawyers, accountants and loopholes. So, wanting them to pay a similar percentage to you, DOES amount to them paying "higher" taxes. In my country, foreign (or rather, multinational) corporations that invariably make huge profits, pay zero taxes, by doing the following: - they transfer 'ownership' of critical company resources, e.g. the software WE develop, to a remote entity that is also them, typically on e.g. cayman islands. Then our local subsidiaries rent/lease OUR OWN SOFTWARE back from the cayman part, in order to serve it to our clients. Our local subsidiaries pay a silly huge leasing fee for using "its own software" - as much or more than what our clients pay for using the software services. The net result is, that our local subsidiaries always operate with a loss, no profits, which both results in no taxes having to be paid, and the "losses" being tax deductible (depending on details, both can be useful). The real net result is, that a huge profit is funnelled out of our countries, with no taxes paid for local services, wear and tear. When your size allows you to hold the pen when writing the tax laws, tax does not apply to you. Tax is something the wealthy and society extracts from the taxable classes. They don't extract it from the rich, it is in direct opposition to the nature of being rich - rich is something you become, by being exempt from the rules that apply to 'lesser' creatures. And if the low-income classes do not provide taxable income, I wonder why the republicans are so hellbent from prohibiting poor people from getting abortions. It suggests to me, they DO believe poor people serve some purpose, given that they insist on creation of new poor people.
    • 4y ago
• lukas099 4y ago
  The article isn't saying anything about not paying your taxes. It's about reducing the taxes you owe. Just like I do when I claim my standard deduction every year.
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  The problem with taxes is that all the money effectively goes into a black hole from where senile, clueless or malicious politicians can draw to give to their friends, fall prey to unscrupulous suppliers (or be complicit and get a kickback, allowing them to "launder" public money into their own pocket) or spend it fighting stupid battles all while the country is falling apart (the UK as an example is notorious for constantly beating the "internet filtering" drum - low-income kids are starving and families can't afford heating bills, but porn on the internet is obviously a bigger problem). I won't downvote and I agree with you in principle and wish I was lucky enough to live in a country where I can actually feel like I'm getting value out of my tax money, but as of right now that's not the case so I can totally understand tax evader's positions.
• roenxi 4y ago
  I don't think anyone has done the legwork to link "your taxes" and a moral aspect. There are a lot of basic unresolved questions (if Jeff Bezos pays more in taxes than you earn in your lifetime, has he payed his fair share? Why/why not? Are the standards used to work that out some sort of objective moral or just a reflection of personal interest speaking? A suspicious number of moral justifications involve other people paying all the taxes & not the moraliser). And a company like Apple has had a bigger positive influence on my lifestyle than a large number of government agencies. Some of those agencies are trying to make my life worse as far as I reckon it. If the law says some entity must pay X tax it is uncertain what it would mean, in practice, to claim "their taxes" were really Y, some other amount they aren't legally obliged to pay. > The whole idea that you can make a billion dollar business without being hugely dependent on the infrastructure, education, history, societal background etc that has largely been paid for by...taxes...is utter fallacy. A business is a hypothetical entity, a term for a system of organising people to do things. Things that are measurably in high demand. It is profoundly uncertain that diverting money out of those systems is a good idea. Observing that businesses rely on their context does not start or end the argument about how much tax they should pay.
• throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  > Unfashionable thought: pay your damn taxes. >~ braces for inevitable downvotes ~ If you get downvoted it will be because you stated an opinion that is in no way controversial among these demographics and then pretended like you were making some noble stand based on principals when in reality you were just the first person to come along and say what half of everyone was thinking and you weren't really risking much blowback.
• parkingrift 4y ago
  Why? Is there some correlation between the amount of capital gains I’ve made and the amount of money society needs? If I were to make less in capital gains does that mean society is missing out in some way? I pay federal income taxes, payroll taxes, medicare and medicaid taxes, social security taxes, corporate taxes, state income taxes, city income taxes, property taxes, and more. Why should I then pay a huge capital gains bill? Why should I feel morally obligated to do such a thing? I think you’re missing all the taxes paid along the way to achieving a billion dollar business. For me it’s 47% per year. Far more than I would consider my fair share considering most people pay an effective rate of 0%.
• LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  If all you have to encourage people not to use those loopholes is an appeal to their morality, then you should not be surprised to find a bunch of amoral people and amoral corporations ignoring you. The rich must be forced to do the right thing, otherwise they will not do it. Expecting otherwise is lunacy. Maybe one or two foolish and good ones will try to do the right thing, but they'll be swiftly out-competed in our hyper-efficient economy by those willing to break rules and cut corners.
  • lukas099 4y ago
    Not just the rich. PEOPLE must be made to do the right thing.