It's effectively a 1.2% wealth tax that's based on a 30% tax on assumed capital gains of 4%. The thing is, the assumed gains are generally far lower than reality, and the tax is also much lower than regular income tax.
The assumed yield varies by asset. For capital gains from investments it is >6% (roughly the expected return on the stock markets for the last century), for cash it is <1% (real returns used to be a bit higher but currently are extremely low, effectively overtaxing by a lot). But as already said above they are currently changing the law to use the actual yield instead, so the top level comment advice doesn't really matter anymore.
That's what the issue is: there are loopholes, and far too many of them. The fact that some people get to deduct costs or have access to tax avoidance loopholes that most people don't have access to, is wrong. And governments don't do enough to fix this.
Because most of the "loopholes" aren't actually loopholes: they are created for a specific reason under some specific economic theory. Most often, to encourage people to make certain types of investments, avoid double- or triple-taxing certain activities, etc.
We just almost never talk about it in neutral terms: why was this policy implemented, what are the pros and cons, etc. Instead, it's just political talking points to get people to the voting booth.
There are some loopholes that aren't actually loopholes, and I can't claim to have counted to know whether it's a majority or not. But programs like the QSBS thing the source article describes are definitely loopholes in the intuitive sense. Politicians wanted millionaire business owners to be somewhat richer, didn't want the political headache of directly giving those business owners our tax money, so they lowered the tax rate on a specific category of income that only millionaire business owners can arrange to receive.
It's true of course that there was an economic theory behind the policy. It's a subsidy; the government thinks it's important for the US to have more small businesses, and hopes that more people will set one up if the financial rewards for doing so are greater. Perhaps you could even find some business owner to explain why they would have stayed in their corporate job if not for the QSBS. But this subsidy could never have gotten majority support if it wasn't obfuscated behind the tax code.
I'm sure many of them weren't intended as loopholes (although I suspect some were), but the simple fact is that they do turn out to be loopholes.
A few famous examples:
If you own a large chunk of a large company, of course you don't want to sell it, so you hold onto it. This means you're never going to pay any capital gains tax over it. But if you don't sell your stock, how do you get money to buy food and super yachts? You borrow it, with your stock as collateral. And you don't have to pay tax over loans, so you're still tax free. You do have to pay interest of course, but because of the collateral, interest is likely low, and as long as stock goes up, you can always borrow more to pay that interest.
Every part of this makes sense on its own, and yet the end result is that billionaires don't pay tax, and barely have to try to avoid tax; this construction would make sense even if they did have to pay tax over it.
Another: charitable foundations. Every rich person seems to have one. And because the government wants to encourage charity, they're tax free. But they're rarely real charities and they often have poor performance as charities, because that's not their real purpose. They just let you keep your money without having to pay tax over it, and the only cost is that you're somewhat limited in how you can use that money. But billionaires have plenty of money they're not actively using.
And sometimes it's also a nice vehicle for corruption, because foreign officials can also donate money to a charitable foundation.
How is it that Oracle gets to claim this trademark at all? They never created it, Netscape did. Oracle bought Sun which could have challenged Netscape for naming JavaScript after Java, but I don't think they ever did.
While I wholeheartedly agree with all of this, I feel like this ship may have sailed a very long time ago. Does it really make sense to continue fighting html email?
Yup. I would assume people in Europe have a good idea on what it looks like from memories passed on from grandparents. I guess the losing chunk of US population can't stop shaming the other party.
China is facially a fascist state. Fascism isn't a simple pejorative, its a category of political ideologies that can and have been implemented. There's no hyperbole in stating that.
Musk absolutely is. He has made that abundantly clear. His support for antisemitism and other forms of racism, his embrace of extremists, his support for AfD and Trump, his Nazi salute. He has very clearly shown us who he is.
China is something else. Not entirely sure what; possible entirely its own thing, but definitely totalitarian.
The BYD CEO (whoever that is) is a lot less in your face about their support for that.
Let's face it, it's easy to ignore this stuff if it happens quietly. Tesla would probably have been fine if Musk had quietly financed Musk. He's being too public and blatant about it. Most consumers don't actually care that much until you rub their faces in it. Which Musk does.
It would absolutely be better if consumers were more aware of the hidden atrocities behind the products they buy. I try to avoid Chinese products, don't buy from Amazon, I've got a Fairphone, am picky about where my chocolate comes from, and avoid Chiquita, Nestle and brands like that. But I'm a tiny minority. We do need more awareness about this sort of thing.
But even with all the awareness that Musk is creating about his own fascism, there are still people buying his cars.
Nearly every American tech company actively started going after "White people" (which is just another name for Europeans) both with political PR and with actual actions and that didn't seem to effect their European sales so that's probably not it.
What do you mean by "go after white people"? They go after everybody. American tech companies plaster every corner of the internet with whatever they're trying to sell or own.
And if you want to boycott them, I'm all for that. I don't buy from Amazon or Microsoft either. There are alternatives to Google.
It's true that they've made enormous inroads into Europe in recent years, but now that they all seem to support America's increasing turn towards fascism, you will also see Europe slowly move away from them. But abandoning the cloud infrastructure that you just invested millions in, is a lot harder than buying a different car, so the change is slower.
Occam's razor: your premise is false. Nobody feels aggrieved by these purported actions except far-right pundits and those trapped in their propaganda web. (And I say this as a white person.)
In contrast, Musk said that people I care about were part of the "parasite class" and chuckled about cutting their benefits. Fuck that.
You're missing the point here. It's not okay, it's less known, as long as it's quiet. Musk is going out of his way to generate a lot of bad PR for himself. Do you really expect that to have no effect?
It's not quite the same thing, though. Nobody would really care about the CEO's private opinions, no matter how unpleasant, but funding and running public campaigns for far-right parties (or threatening to do so even in Europe) is very different.
Once we've got abundant clean energy, it might not matter so much anymore, but as long as we're still burning carbon, it matters a lot. And until we get there, we should probably do both.
Nuclear power plants are expensive and take time to build, though. At the moment we're still burning way too much oil and coal for our energy, and everything that drives up demand, contributes to that.
We had it 40 years and we will have it the next N-Thousand years because of the waste they produce.
Also, Nuclear-Power was massive subvention by the gov. Actually a business-case that can not exist without subvention. So we all paid it with the taxes and we still pay because of the nuclear-wast.
The idea to build new nuclear-plants, is a new subvention-scam by some lobbyists or tech-giants who want to pass on their costs to the general public.
The reality is a deep geological repository[1] for high radioactive waste. And this is also necessary for reprocessing [2]. Reprocessing will only reduce the high level waste.
I don't remember anyone complaining about it taking too long, 40 years ago. People were worried about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, about what to do with the waste, about leakage. But not about time.
But whatever the causes, too little has been done over those 40 years, and at the moment, solar is far cheaper and faster to deploy than nuclear. I'm not stopping anyone from building nuclear power plants, but I think its window has gone. It's too expensive and too slow. But feel free to prove me wrong.
What I'd like to know is: has anyone ever sued Amazon for this? There seems to be plenty of evidence for a massive class action suit. They are knowingly and intentionally screwing sellers and customers alike.
What Israel is doing checks the first and third items in your list. They kill members of the group, and not just in Gaza; in the Westbank, it's common for illegal settlers to attack Palestinian towns, including killing people. The IDF does nothing to stop them, but if Palestinians try to defend themselves against this aggression, IDF shows up to stop that.
The wall separates farmers from their land, and has made it nearly impossible for Palestinians to live their life, to go to work, etc. And Gaza is a ghetto; an open-air prison, with way too many people, and no way for them to build a normal life. Israel has also kicked Palestinians out of their homes in order to give them to Jews.
I'm not denying that Hamas is also genocidal; they clearly and openly are. And probably more so in intent, but a lot less so in capability. Israel has been killing and disrupting a lot more Palestinian lives than the other way around.
Do you think these are all accidents? Read what I wrote. The intent is clearly there.
If Hitler said "I'm not going to kill any Jews" while murdering a million Jews, would you believe he didn't have the intent to kill them? And there's plenty of people in Israel who do talk openly about destroying Palestine, destroying Gaza, killing or deporting all Palestinians, and even arguing that Palestinians aren't a real people (like Putin does with Ukrainians). All of that shows intent.
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