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> Among them, you! The people in this article aren’t buying them out of paychecks. Capital gains rates are their worst case scenario. I know that however unles

> Among them, you! The people in this article aren’t buying them out of paychecks. Capital gains rates are their worst case scenario. 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.

gaadd33 3y ago
Why sell assets when you can get a loan against them and the appreciation covers the interest cost? Then you have no taxes to pay and plenty of money to spend.
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  I don’t get it, eventually you have to pay back the loan and pay the capital gains tax, so what? People do what you suggest and there isn’t anything wrong with it, they still pay same taxes eventually.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    If you have $10 billion in shares, you take out a billion in a loan with the shares as collateral. You repay it out of that billion, at low interest. Start running low? Take another loan. The shares are worth $20B now anyways! Never actually having to sell shares means no taxes, plenty of operating funds. Quite common. https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidance-techniques-irs-files https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidanc...
    - alchemist1e9 3y ago
      I don’t see there being any issue. Eventually the final loan will be repaid with income. Like most of these types of articles they are just Envy clickbait nonsense.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        > Eventually the final loan will be repaid with income. 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.
        alchemist1e9 3y ago
        Isn’t Roth IRA available to anyone? It seems like the complaint is that somehow since he is so successful it isn’t fair he uses the same system regular people do also? Because he has billions he should be extra taxed. It’s also not fair hollywood stars are so much more attractive than most of us, let’s kick their faces in to even it out? 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.
  - gaadd33 3y ago
    You die and then you don't have to pay back the loan and any capital gains taxes. The assets are marked to market for tax purposes, then the estate can liquidate them to satisfy the debt and the heirs get the remaining assets and can sell with no tax due.
ceejayoz 3y ago
> The fact we accept the government is entitled to 15% of that asset value increase is frankly insane. 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.
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  How about we have employers pay all the money to employees directly, everything, no payroll taxes, no “employer” taxes, and then collect everything directly from the citizens. The current tax regime would result in a revolution in 1 year. Perhaps have them also pay for health insurance. Pay all that money directly to the payroll employees. Everyone would go ballistic if the numbers weren’t hidden from them and they weren’t tricked with the tax refund gimmick of giving people $5/100 they paid back.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    As someone who pays for insurance directly (at $3k/month for a family), I'm all for making these costs more visible. A significant amount of the resistance to single-payer healthcare is people incorrectly thinking they pay $50/month for theirs because that's what their employer makes them chip in.
    - alchemist1e9 3y ago
      People making what they are told is $70K/year are actually paid significantly more than that and their overall actual tax rate, because employer tax doesn’t actually exist economically since any tax the employer pays due to hiring the employee is a direct tax on the employee period, the real tax rate for common people is already nearing 50%! If we add the medical side in, which I agree is connected when comparing to other healthcare systems, which I do NOT agree are better, but still adding those in and a typical upper middle class suburban household is taking home a shockingly small chunk of their total economic compensation the employer is paying them. That healthcare costs are compensation, period, benefits is another euphemism ingrained in all of us, being used to hide the ugly truths from the general population.

gaadd33 3y ago

Why sell assets when you can get a loan against them and the appreciation covers the interest cost? Then you have no taxes to pay and plenty of money to spend.

alchemist1e9 3y ago
I don’t get it, eventually you have to pay back the loan and pay the capital gains tax, so what? People do what you suggest and there isn’t anything wrong with it, they still pay same taxes eventually.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  If you have $10 billion in shares, you take out a billion in a loan with the shares as collateral. You repay it out of that billion, at low interest. Start running low? Take another loan. The shares are worth $20B now anyways! Never actually having to sell shares means no taxes, plenty of operating funds. Quite common. https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidance-techniques-irs-files https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidanc...
  - alchemist1e9 3y ago
    I don’t see there being any issue. Eventually the final loan will be repaid with income. Like most of these types of articles they are just Envy clickbait nonsense.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      > Eventually the final loan will be repaid with income. 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.
      - alchemist1e9 3y ago
        Isn’t Roth IRA available to anyone? It seems like the complaint is that somehow since he is so successful it isn’t fair he uses the same system regular people do also? Because he has billions he should be extra taxed. It’s also not fair hollywood stars are so much more attractive than most of us, let’s kick their faces in to even it out? 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.
- gaadd33 3y ago
  You die and then you don't have to pay back the loan and any capital gains taxes. The assets are marked to market for tax purposes, then the estate can liquidate them to satisfy the debt and the heirs get the remaining assets and can sell with no tax due.

ceejayoz 3y ago

> The fact we accept the government is entitled to 15% of that asset value increase is frankly insane. 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.

alchemist1e9 3y ago
How about we have employers pay all the money to employees directly, everything, no payroll taxes, no “employer” taxes, and then collect everything directly from the citizens. The current tax regime would result in a revolution in 1 year. Perhaps have them also pay for health insurance. Pay all that money directly to the payroll employees. Everyone would go ballistic if the numbers weren’t hidden from them and they weren’t tricked with the tax refund gimmick of giving people $5/100 they paid back.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  As someone who pays for insurance directly (at $3k/month for a family), I'm all for making these costs more visible. A significant amount of the resistance to single-payer healthcare is people incorrectly thinking they pay $50/month for theirs because that's what their employer makes them chip in.
  - alchemist1e9 3y ago
    People making what they are told is $70K/year are actually paid significantly more than that and their overall actual tax rate, because employer tax doesn’t actually exist economically since any tax the employer pays due to hiring the employee is a direct tax on the employee period, the real tax rate for common people is already nearing 50%! If we add the medical side in, which I agree is connected when comparing to other healthcare systems, which I do NOT agree are better, but still adding those in and a typical upper middle class suburban household is taking home a shockingly small chunk of their total economic compensation the employer is paying them. That healthcare costs are compensation, period, benefits is another euphemism ingrained in all of us, being used to hide the ugly truths from the general population.