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Who died and left the US $7B?
- toomuchtodo 2y agohttps://www.texasmonthly.com/article/houston-fayez-serofim-dies-93/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/article/houston-fayez-serofim-d...
- cfraenkel 2y agoInteresting enough read, but the post title is misleading. It was hardly a gift, it was an estate tax payment. Not everyone is a greedy narcissist only out for themselves!
- Danieru 2y agoLeft does not mean gift, it's a common term which applies when politely referring to the a recipient of an inheritance.
- bombcar 2y agoLeft means a gift via inheritance, which is the exact opposite of an estate tax (it's not a gift or via inheritance, it's a tax on the value of an estate and paid before distribution).
- s1artibartfast 2y agoThey could have squandered the money or given it away. They could could have blown it on building a pyramid to house their corpse. The government is not entitled to the assets.
- chgs 2y agoThey aren’t entitled to their assets. They only have worth because of civilisation. How well do you think bill gates would survive in a mad max utopia that Randians fantasize about?
- bombcar 2y agoI was severely disappointed when I realized that, I thought some billionaire had gone nuts with https://www.treasurydirect.gov/government/public-debt-reports/gifts/ https://www.treasurydirect.gov/government/public-debt-report...
- dylan604 2y agoand in the 3 seconds it took to read you comment, the interest on the debt increased more than this "gift"
- wahern 2y agoIt takes about 30 seconds for the US National Debt clock (https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/) to tick off $1 million, so almost 2.5 days to tick off $7 billion. I'd say $7 billion covers much more than 3 seconds of interest.
- dylan604 2y agoeven in your "correct" math, your comment doesn't really improve the ridiculously small amount of moving of a needle that this would make
- sushid 2y ago"Even if I was wrong by many orders of magnitude, I'm still correct!"
- wahern 2y agoI mean... so I just noticed the "US Total Interest Paid" clock. That takes about 45 seconds to tick over $1 million, so $7 billion covers ~1% of the interest payments in a year. That seems like a sizable contribution for a single person in a country of 330 million.
- dylan604 2y ago
- elzbardico 2y agoGiven the fact, as stated in the article that there are a myriad of legal ways by which millionaires and billionaires can skip paying the estate tax, it could very well have been the result of an intentional decision not to evade this by some socially-conscious dying billionaire citizen.
- rzzzt 2y agoThere is also a fair bit left after taxes: "Based on estimates of the average tax rate on estates, the February 2023 payment implied the death of someone possessing a fortune between $17.5 and $40 billion."
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoI'm sure their is a hidden joke about interest payments for the federal debt. Wonder what the gov will do with the cash they found in the couch.
- Kapura 2y agoPretty obscene that somebody could have so much wealth that $7,000,000,000 is just the tax bill. Also weird that it's framed as a "gift."
- FredPret 2y ago[flagged]
- HauntedDrum 2y agolol, please elaborate
- mmmpetrichor 2y agoIt's draconian to have some upper limit on wealth? what if a small number of people managed to, legally, extract wealth to the point where we all became vassals? (Or is that what we've already gone very far towards?)
- AdrianB1 2y agoNo. But it is a slippery slope of having limits on people, from wealth to anything you can think of (random example: limit ownership to a single car). In the end if it is all legal, it is nobody else's business. If it is illegal, setting an upper limit is not the moral solution.
- recursive 2y ago> If it is illegal, setting an upper limit is not the moral solution. Any particular reason you believe that?
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- AdrianB1 2y ago
- Apocryphon 2y agoSatoshi?
- ianwehba 2y ago> Some tax attorneys I spoke with theorized that the $7 billion payment was in fact a gift tax paid as part of an estate-planning strategy designed to avoid an even larger payment down the road, a strategy they expect to be common ahead of the Trump tax expiration.
- yieldcrv 2y agoI hope this is educational for people, indeed the forbes rich list is inaccurate and there is no way to know how much anyone is worth, with just 5 minutes of planning it all goes opaque if you so desire Although there is the aspect of the immigrant being grateful for American opportunities, its far more likely that Fayez Sarofim didn’t expect to die and had these naked assets outside of the trusts and nonprofits. Since he also had trusts and nonprofits.
- manquer 2y agoinaccurate or incomplete ? The latter is to be expected. Forbes only covers certain type of wealthy people for logistical if not also political reasons. It does not cover powerful people who control enormous wealth but ownership maybe murky what is personal wealth and what is state owned, royal families or dictators like Putin or Kim Jong Un or their extended family will never make the list. Beyond those kind of people, the murky and opaque ways that money can hidden also means it is hard to track estates that did not come from publicly made fortunes (ex: from listed company etc) that can be somewhat easily tracked. Even when public like Bitcoin and crypto, Nakomoto 's estimated ~1.1M bitcoins is worth $70B today, nobody knows who he is. There haven't been any transfers from those addresses, however that doesn't mean a part of that enormous fortune is outside the bitcoin ecosystem as real money, the owner of the wallet could be using them as security for large loans like Elon (or other rich people typically do ) does with their stock without actually selling it to minimize tax.
- yieldcrv 2y agook but yes inaccurate was the accurate word choice I wasnt talking state actors and unlinked crypto fortunes Just wealth from opaque sources and opaque vehicles All limited partners in Venture/Hedge/PE funds are opaque for example
- chgs 2y agoOn the other hand perhaps the keys to that 70B have been lost, in which case bitcoin has deflated even more than expected.
- 2y ago
- niobe 2y agoMy takeaway: Forbes rich list amounts are basically fictional. Do you think they are devoting the kind of resources it would take to unravel each billionaire's finances? Clearly not. If it's mostly large sharehioldings they might be in the ballpark in some obvious cases.
- seb1204 2y agoHow about the rich list is just a list of rich people that also desire others to know of their riches.
- umeshunni 2y agoFamously, there was the Saudi billionaire who would pump up the price of his stocks in the months prior to when they published the rich list.
- fakedang 2y agoAl Waleed bin Talal. Shrewd businessman, but also one of the most fragile egos out there.
- daedrdev 2y agoProbably more that it's easier to figure out wealth from public stocks compared to private businesses and real estate.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoforbes sell entertainment. their clients are not even who read it, but advertisers who but advertisement. readers and space for ads on the magazine pages are both called inventory in the biz.
- JALTU 2y agoA legit biz, I mean, look at everyone reading and commenting here! :)
- iJohnDoe 2y ago[flagged]
- seb1204 2y agoThanks ChatGPT.
- renewiltord 2y agoSummarizing it to say it was Fayez Sarofim was useful to me.
- iJohnDoe 2y agoAgreed, it was useful explaining what the article was getting at. It was written in such a way to be less than straightforward. Also, explaining the estate-tax and significance was helpful. The title indicating $7b was left to the US is accurate, but disingenuous.
- ThrowawayR2 2y agoWhether it's useful or not, the moderators have said that machine generated submissions and comments are not welcome on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628
- renewiltord 2y agoThat’s fine. Ideally, people keep posting them and they keep getting flagged and I can still see them and thank them haha.
- Amorymeltzer 2y agoMatt Levine touched on this briefly today, and I liked his two cents: >It’s kind of cool? Like you could imagine a hierarchy, in roughly ascending order of wealth: >Too poor to pay taxes. >Rich enough to pay taxes. >Rich enough to not pay taxes. >Rich enough to not even bother with not paying taxes.
- H8crilA 2y ago[flagged]
- leprechaun1066 2y agoIn 2021/2022 there were 60 people in the UK who probably fall into that last group. Together their taxes accounted for about 1.4% of the UK tax bill despite being something like 0.002% of the population.
- vlovich123 2y agoWhat percentage of the wealth did they control?
- schiem 2y agoBy summing up the top 60 entries for UK billionares from The Times Rich List for 2024 (which is data from 2023), I get almost exactly 500 billion pounds in net worth (£499.55bn). According to Wikipedia, the UK had a total net worth of $15,972bn USD, which comes out to £12,298bn at the current exchange rate of 0.77 pounds / dollar. That comes out to around 4.1% of the total wealth. However, the number from Wikipedia is from 2022, so this figure isn't going to be entirely accurate.
- arcticbull 2y agoAre you familiar with the concept of noblesse oblige? Further does this include all taxes or just income taxes which are only a portion of revenues used to make less well off people look like moochers. For instance, in the US, there’s social security and Medicare taxes -- and payroll tax, the social security and Medicare tax contributed on behalf of employees by employers. Renters also pay their landlords property taxes. Sales taxes, tariffs, etc are all born by end users.
- jmpeax 2y agoWhat does being rich even mean? For us it might be the total sum of shares, realestate, cash, minus debts. If you're hiding your wealth then what does it mean to "have" that wealth if no one knows it belongs to you? I guess it comes down to the wealth you can control in your favour, but then how is that different to being in congress?
- dools 2y ago> but then how is that different to being in congress? Less work, less risk, the ability to corruptly influence multiple people in congress by proxy rather than scrounging around for funds from corrupt private individuals out to influence policy in their favour.
- ChainOfFools 2y agoWealth is a proxy for having options, even if you do not exercise them. There are thus many forms of wealth, and some do not translate directly across domain boundaries. Arnold Schwarzenegger famously explained that he remains committed to a demanding bodybuilding regimen even long after becoming fabulously wealthy precisely because his physique is a form of wealth that cannot be bought at any price, and is available to almost anyone who wants it badly enough. A billionaire facing an acute and aggressive terminal cancer diagnosis has all the options anyone could want, but one.
- xpe 2y agoYes, there are many forms of power. Different forms are sometimes fungible to various degrees (varying across time and space). I would expect that financial wealth is the most fungible form of any of them under usual circumstances.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago> What does being rich even mean? To me it means living in a country where the government's debt ain't more than 30% of the country's GDP. So I moved to such a country.
- MobiusHorizons 2y ago
- disillusioned 2y agoOne of the funny takeaways here is: there are so many more billionaires out there, who spend considerable effort to remain off these lists and otherwise anonymous. I work with one, and he's not on ANY of the Forbes or Bloomberg lists, though articles about his projects and investments obviously make the news. That's, as the article alludes to, the funny thing about private equity: it does a very good job _staying_ private.
- whatshisface 2y agoDoes the IRS know?
- kortilla 2y agoThe IRS doesn’t track assets, so unlikely. They don’t really even know how wealthy small business owners are
- cheema33 2y agoAnd then there are those who try very hard to get on the list. I know at least one famous one.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- shusaku 2y ago> There are many complexities, but one popular technique is to put assets into trusts that allow the returns to accrue for heirs without taxation. Nike founder Phil Knight, for example, put his company’s stock in a series of trusts to benefit his children. The trusts pay him a modest return, but the rest of the gains avoid incurring estate tax, including Nike shares that were worth $6.1 billion in 2021, Bloomberg reported. … > Behn’s clients typically want to maximize the money they leave for their children or establish a philanthropic legacy; some seek to do both. I’m sure that the numbers on these schemes work out favorably on paper, but if you lived through WW2 I wonder if you might be willing to pay a premium to give your immediate heirs maximum flexibility, knowing that the future is unpredictable.
- ip26 2y agoWhat are the odds of something like WWII though, compared to the odds it’s all spent by the second generation?
- aprilthird2021 2y agoNormally you'd be right, but we are eerily close to a WWIII right now...
- paxys 2y agoWe have been "eerily close" to WWIII since the day WWII ended. There's nothing really special about today's situation.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoThe situation now is much worse than before COVID. That much is obvious. There are two major wars involving developed nations which were not happening then
- HaZeust 2y agoThe fun thing about this war-mongering doom and gloom sentiment is that neither of you are right, yet. That said, 2 developed nations are at war, and a NATO nation is being substantially threatened.
- drexlspivey 2y agoThis $7B is enough to fund the US Federal government for about 8 hours
- EricE 2y agoYes, what a colossal waste - would have been much better going to charities.
- ricardobeat 2y agoChoose your charities wisely. The average is something like 66% of funds going to the actual cause, and it varies wildly between 10% and 95%+.
- bluGill 2y agoThere is value in those other things. Administration is an important job - while it is justifiably looked down on because it is easy to bloat, there are important things that need to be done. And those administrators really should have comfortable chairs, motorized standing desks (yes both!), coffee, and other those other little things that make life in an office better.
- edm0nd 2y agoOn the flipside, imagine if they gave $7B to an anti-government group or militia to perform a coup or attack another country... That could buy a ton of arms and equipment and likely enough funds to be successful depending upon what the ultimate goal was.
- lovich 2y agoA single person funding a government for >330 million people even for only 8 hours is pretty impressive. Gives off malcador holding the golden throne for a short time energy
- cmplxconjugate 2y agoI have a sudden new appreciation for the Lincoln Memorial.
- rKarpinski 2y agoElon Musk or another person pre-paying some of their future estate tax, don't buy the other angle.
- dh2022 2y agoThe author certainly makes this a plausible explanation. And yet I am thinking- if this is indeed the case, why we did not see similar payments this size more often?
- rKarpinski 2y agoTax avoidance strategies aren't exactly advertised so it could be a novel tactic; and it probably would require an absurd liquid net worth to be worth pursuing (it might even preclude Texas billionaires like Michael Dell or Christy Walton)
- morpheuskafka 2y agoSurprisingly some people are apparently advertising tax advoidance strategies, which is why the IRS has the authority to regulate "promoters" of certain schemes, such as a recently popular one where unuseful land is donated to conservation to generate a large deduction.
- IAmNotACellist 2y agoI can't imagine something more useless than an estate giving money to the US federal government rather than secreting it away via legal tax loopholes and re-investments in new industry.
- dweinus 2y agoTIL that in 2024 people are still trying to claim that trickle-down economics works. Given all the wealth at the top these days, I'll expect my trickle-down check in the mail any day now.
- chasd00 2y agoGiving $7B to the gov changes zero. Not a single function of the government will change not a single thing. They should have just thrown it in the trash. At least go pay off student loans with a lottery until the money is gone or something, that could help. Maybe pay all the mortgages in a small town or something. What they did by giving it to the gov is the same as setting it on fire in the front yard. It’s kind of upsetting.
- sneak 2y agoThe logical conclusion of this line of thinking is that you must then believe there to be a moral obligation to always pay service people in cash and avoid paying taxes at every possible opportunity. Do I understand your position correctly?
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- ilammy 2y agoDon’t put your words in their mouth. Giving government money doesn’t really change the way government operates. The government has the budget for the year and that’s the spending for the year. If government needs something done, an item gets budgeted, money is borrowed, and paid out to get stuff done. Giving money to the government only offsets the debt; nothing else changes from that besides the number in the spreadsheet.
- sneak 2y agoThis amount will be sufficient to operate the US military for just under four days.
- chgs 2y agoHow much of that would be spent directly on wages for people working for eh US military and how much sent to external firms? On the other hand how much is sent to external firms where most of their expenditure is in the US and thus comes back rather swiftly in taxes, and how much is siphoned off to overseas stores of wealth.
- triceratops 2y agoGenuinely impressive. This guy's tax bill alone could operate the most powerful military that has ever existed for the better part of a week.
- paxys 2y agoYou could conquer a sizable chunk of land in 4 days with the US military at your disposal. Not a bad ROI for $7B.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ksec 2y agoI was having this discussions the other day where my boss thinks these wiki list and Forbes list are some sort of ground truth. The Forbes list only include people who Forbes want it to be listed and / or are public record. For example Michael Bloomberg is included but he is not even on the Bloomberg billionaires list, simply because Forbes want to expose him. And there were plenty of Billionaires in China who wasn't listed before lots of information becomes public. And I would imagine the same for Brazil, India or lots of other countries. These list can only include people by their stock market cap or worth. It doesn't include people who are in the property market and basically own or operate via private equity. And there are plenty of billionaires in the property market. Along with many other asset that we dont even know or aware. Another thing, if a person with $10B net worth of stock for 25 years, and the stock has been paying 3% dividends per year. You will still see him listed as $10B net worth. In reality he has $10B of dividends already. ( Although in US I think dividends are taxed ). And that is excluding any investment he made with those dividends and operate completely in the dark. Basically because the ultra wealth are so opaque I argue that inequality is actually much wider than we thought or what we could calculate.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Jedd 2y agoA fascinating reddit post was mentioned here about a month ago - about the mildly famous (if a little macabre) 'Buy, Borrow, Die' cycle used by the obscenely-wealthy to - multi-generationally - avoid tax obligations. https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26rsf/buy_borrow_die_explained/ https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26... HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408772
- frinxor 2y agoah missed this one, thank you!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rufus_foreman 2y agoCan you explain to me what a post about avoiding taxes has to do with a post about not avoiding taxes?
- lantry 2y agowe regularly get comments like this, and people on HN still question the value of a liberal arts education
- omeid2 2y agoAre you joking? How is here is an extreme case of X doesn't relate to an extreme case of -X?
- Jedd 2y agoI don't expect you were genuinely seeking an answer, however I'll point out that the crux of the mystery described in TFA was that it was such a rare event - someone tremendously wealthy didn't avoid this tax - that it was note-worthy.
- _bin_ 2y agoThis is something people love to rage about, yet it's not one with an obvious fix. The counterpoint is that this leaves money invested, which means others invest in other things, and still entails interest payments. It exists in part because you don't want someone who inherited his parents' house and wants to move in to go broke trying to pay taxes, or have to re-mortgage it, with an even stronger case with family farms. And it exists in part because there are so many legitimate cases for doing it, even as a wealthy person: pretend you're a relatively successful businessman whose company has appreciated to $50mm. In this world, you can't just leave your gains unrealized and borrow against them. So you can - Try to find somebody to sell to, which is a sketchy move. Of course, as your company continues to appreciate, you will be forced to continue reducing your ownership stake. Over time, this will make keeping a family business in the family largely impossible. - Try to find money to pay taxes. This means less money for R&D, for expansion, for your employees. - Just dump the whole business to private equity and move on. These all suck, and the government generally collects money on assets as they move not assets at rest. I see no way to resolve it that isn't suckier than the status quo and so am left with the conclusion that people who agitate for such changes are more resentful of the rich than they are worried about the justice or lack thereof of tax avoidance.
- ksec 2y agoThis may be off-topic. >Billionaires are like black holes. We deduce their existence from the fundamental laws of capitalism, see their gravity pull politics into their orbit, even detect signals of their existence in the public markets. I dont know about others. This is very beautifully put. But I am wondering if anyone has an counter argument. Because this basically means money > power; > "As gravity pulls politics into their orbit." It may be true in US or other democratic nations. It certainly isn't true in Russia or China. If what was described was fundamental laws of capitalism, Could we argue those nations where power is greater than money are not capitalism? If so, what is the opposing force against the laws of capitalism? And are there anything in physics such as opposing force of the laws of gravity? Without going into Space Time?
- ryandvm 2y agoThe more money you allow into politics, the more politics becomes about money.
- ksec 2y agoThank You !
- whatshisface 2y agoThe pull of oligarchs is more real in Russia than anywhere else in the world.
- cheema33 2y ago> The pull of oligarchs is more real in Russia than anywhere else in the world. It may have been true at some point. But, Putin put an end to it. He killed oligarchs when they fell out of line. There are some ex-oligarchs living outside of Russia, no longer super rich, after Putin took away their wealth.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago> But I am wondering if anyone has an counter argument. Confiscating all the US billionaires' wealth wouldn't even lower the US's debt by 20%. France's public spending is 60% of the GDP, the situation in France is totally catastrophic (6% deficit atm) and... We should listen to Piketty because he's only ever worked public jobs and... He's french? And came up with an ultra-simplistic formula using bogus data? I mean... If Piketty says it, obviously government spending representing 60% of the GDP ain't enough. Let's make it 100% and called it a planned economy. Because we saw a lot of fully functioning communist societies on earth? Ponder this.
- BobAliceInATree 2y agoI've always thought based on the number of $10+MM condos in NYC that sit unoccupied (i.e. 2nd or 3rd or more homes), that there must be an order of magnitude more billionaires out there than we know about, and this certainly gives credence to that.
- Beijinger 2y agoState of the Union https://i.ibb.co/ZXF6S9C/usa.jpg https://i.ibb.co/ZXF6S9C/usa.jpg
- _bin_ 2y agoThe reference to Piketty with its implication that Sarofim represents some hidden class of billionaires is particularly annoying. He was prolific in Houston's social business scene for decades and married the Brown heiress, who was similarly known (along with her father). He threw some of the best Christmas parties and wasn't exactly a recluse, so I see relatively little reason to connect him to that idea. His son Christopher is very similar. He was worth upwards of the author's estimate but a generally good guy who doesn't really deserve the "evil billionaire" label which the author quietly assigns.
- 1024core 2y ago> Last year, observers with the economic equivalent of a radio telescope detected a radiating anomaly on the February 28, 2023, daily balance sheet of the US Treasury Department: a $7 billion estate- and gift-tax payment. Where can one find this daily balance sheet?
- ak217 2y agohttps://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/daily-treasury-statement/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/daily-treasury-stat...
- FactKnower69 2y ago>people with an estate that is taxable — worth more than $13.6 million, or $27.2 million for a married couple the regulatory capture on display in the USA is absolutely pathetic hahaha
- kouru225 2y agoIf the US was really capitalist it would publish the wealth leaderboards for everyone to see
- bluGill 2y agoYou can't really do that because there is no way to know how much someone is worth. What is my house worth - there is no answer until I sell it. You know what it last sold for, but you have no idea if I fixed it up since then so it is worth more; or maybe I was cooking meth and now it is a toxic waste site with negative value. A house is simple to value compared to a business. A yacht is another asset that is really hard to value. For public stocks we can at least calculate value with computers, but for some that is a minority of value. In 1960 the DOW was used because it is only 30 stocks so you can add the values up every few minutes - the S&P 500 could only be calculated at the end of the day as by the time you got the value of the last stock the value of the first had changed.
- jmpman 2y agoThis is the most frustrating news I’ve read about taxes. As an American, I’d like to think that our tax system was designed to be fair. Yes, Warren Buffet’s secretary famously paid a higher tax percentage than he did, because all of his wealth was in unrealized gains. I’d accepted that - with the understanding that upon Warren’s death, estate taxes would be paid, and “fairness” would be restored to the system. But, lobbying for tax loopholes, wealth left to charities where heirs are awarded outrageous management fees, etc are ways for the extremely wealthy to avoid ever paying these estate taxes. When I heard the democrats push for a billionaire tax, I was quite cynical, as I thought the fairness issue would be resolved through estate taxes. This $7B being an anomaly, suggests that the wealthy are engineering their way around paying these estate taxes. I thought those problems were limited to “step-up” in cost basis type of giveaways to the wealthy. Now I’m reading that even the basic estate taxes aren’t being paid. I’m livid. Hate to say this, but I may now support the democrats plan. It’s a horrible plan, but apparently estate taxes aren’t working either.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago> I’d like to think that our tax system was designed to be fair It is. But everyone has a different definition of "fair."
- jmpman 2y agoBuilding a business empire your entire life, taking loans against that business, having step up cost basis upon death, leaving everything to your heirs - without estate taxes - isn’t “fair”
- ExoticPearTree 2y agoFair would be if everyone would pay a the same percentage on their income, no more brackets. And it should be no more than 10-15% of gross income. That's it. No estate taxe, no inheritance tax, no nothing tax. I am pretty sure that those 10-15% are more than enough to have a functioning government that is able to serve the public pretty well.
- 2y ago
- taylorius 2y agoSo it was a death-duty style tax - that makes more sense. For a minute I was imagining a lawyer reading a will. "And lastly, I leave my entire 7 billion dollar fortune to... the U.S. Government."
- jldugger 2y agoWell, the article leaves open the possibility that it was Musk paying the gift tax now to avoid paying an even larger estate tax later.
- danm 2y agoMaybe a consumption tax with broad exemptions for necessary goods like food, clothing, shelter, etc would be a nice way of dealing with the issues people seem to have with others having wealth. Billionaire heirs use the inheritance to buy a yacht, big tax bill, mostly use the inheritance to continue funding things that are generally good for society, smaller tax bill.
- morpheuskafka 2y agoI don't care if a rich person buys a yacht or not, it's their money and after they've paid the tax they can do whatever they want. The wealthier you are you should pay more tax regardless of how you use the money. Consumption taxes just make it harder for regular people to afford things they want; the wealthy won't care that a luxury bag with 1000% profit margin has an extra 10% tax on top. There's already exemptions for both income and estate tax for donations to charities or governments to benefit society. It's possible to set up a private foundation, with some additional guardrails to prevent abuse, if you want to give the money directly to people that need it.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoMaybe those people should just get over themselves?
- hardtke 2y agoEstate tax valuations of assets should be made public, particularly the taxed value of professional sports franchises. We know that NFL teams are worth $6+ billion dollars, and seeing the billionaire owner families pay tax on 1/10th of that might infuriate voters enough to demand reform.
- Slava_Propanei 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- CatWChainsaw 2y agoRead Moneyland, get mad.
- aster0id 2y agoThe more I learn about the world the more I learn that I don't have any control over much of what will happen to it, and by extension to me. So my choice is to live my life and enjoy it as much as I can.
- jonny_eh 2y agoCan someone fix this grammar? > The data wasn’t erroneous, Treasury officials found, who are legally forbidden to discuss tax filings.
- shruggedatlas 2y agoIt seems awkward because removing the parenthical expression between the commas leaves a broken sentence: "The data wasn't erroneous|who are legally forbidden to discuss tax filings." The best correction would be something like: "Treasury officials, who are legally forbidden to discuss tax filings, found the data wasn't erroneous."
- HaZeust 2y agoWouldn't it be something like: "Treasury officials found that the data wasn’t erroneous, though they are legally forbidden to discuss tax filings." The problem with the original text was that the rule that the officials had was said BEFORE the main point about what they found - which is why the "officials" were brought up in the first place. This one states the important part of what they found, and then gave the addendum that they have a rule that adds a conditional to the nature of sharing the finding. English is weird, by the way.
- deepsun 2y agoOne thing not discussed: Accumulated Earnings Tax. 20% It forces companies to distribute gains to shareholders, not amass it. It already exists, we just don't enforce it enough.