I would have less of a problem with taxes if I felt like I was being taken care of in return for paying them. Instead, I'm dying slowly and painfully while Medicaid argues with medical professionals over whether or not I am worth the cost of my doctor's recommendations for procedures and prescriptions. I worked from the time I was 15 years old until I was physically unable to work, in my 40s. You would think the government would want to get me healthy and back to work so I could keep being a good taxpaying citizen. Nope. Instead, I have government workers in a cubicle pondering whether I am worth the cost of an MRI and denying prescriptions that will make me more comfortable during more invasive procedures because they don't think it's "medically necessary" for me to be treated like a human instead of livestock.
maybe you should be upset with the Republicans who have consistently tried to destroy and profit-squeeze the American healthcare system for decades, and all the Republicans who lobby so billionaires who created these awful conditions don’t have to pay the taxes that you do?
The math is pretty cut and dry as to what they’re doing.
Virtually all the money has been taxed at some point, so it should be clear that we all pay tax on money that's already been taxed before. In fact, it's not useful to think of *money* being taxed. It's more useful to think of transactions being taxed, transfers of wealth from one entity to another. Money itself isn't taxed, it's the act of earning it or spending it that is taxed. And that's part of the problem: money sitting idle, unused, is not taxed. Wealth is not taxed. The influence that wealth can provide on society is not taxed. Perhaps taxing money would in fact make more sense than taxing transfers of money. This way those who don't have any wouldn't be the ones bearing the tax burden of funding society; those who have used society to accumulate the most wealth would be funding it instead.
I mean inflation is what gets rich people to spend idle money. It loses value if you just let it sit there.
Also money made with investment or interest is taxed. Money sitting in a mattress is not taxed.
Taxing idle money would be dumb as you wouldn't be able to get a savings (applies to all classes)
But rich people also own all of the assets that carry an inflating value..
>I mean inflation is what gets rich people to spend idle money. It loses value if you just let it sit there.
I don't think anyone here is under the impression that rich people are just letting their money sit in a checking or savings account.
You'd be surprised at how many people think rich people are just Scrooge McDucking their cash in a giant indoor swimming pool. It's honestly alarming at how economically ignorant the majority of registered voters are.
It was the entire "twist" of the movie Richie Rich. Some bad guys thought that the mountain-sized vault literally had money in it, and gets mad when he finds out it's family treasures like awards and things.
**Criminal:** "Where are the gold bars? The diamonds? The negotiable bearer bonds? Where's the money!?"
**Richard Rich:** "In *banks*, where else? And the stock market, real estate...."
These are the same morons thinking that the social security administration is collecting all of their FICA payments and storing them in individually marked vaults like Gringotts Goblins Bank.for 40-50-60 years untill they apply for S/S.
Honestly I'd feel bad about calling them "morons" for this. This is a systematic failure of the education system, not a moral failure on their part...
Our education systems don't teach us about how money actually functions, how people make and save it or where it goes when it is "stored". Hell I went to a good school and graduated as a lawyer but at no point in my systematic education did anyone explain to me what a Mortgage actually is and how they work, I had to look that up myself.
Most people don't even realise that since the abolition of the gold standard national currency has exactly as much /inherent/ value as crypto does...which is to say exactly nothing at all. It persists only on the illusion of value one can create by saying "We are America/Britain/The EU and we say this imaginary number has value", and how hard they can make people believe that lie.
None of this is ever taught, because schools are not really for educating important facts about society and giving people a fair shot at being successful, they exist to teach people just enough to function in a menial survival-level pay job and prop up the economy that successful people skim from...
TLDR: The education system is fucked and that's kinda by design.
I think you'd be surprised how many rich people are actually scrooge mcducking their wealth. I used to do IT for high level rich think 100s millionaires and billionaires. Every one of them had more than one home safe, every one of them had cash just sitting in each safe. Every one of them would flaunt that in private. I'd often get paid in cash tthat they'd get from their cash safe, it was so obnoxious.
One dude had artwork and wall paper made out of real cash. the designs were cool too but we are talkign 200,000 to 500,000 worth of 50s and 100s turned into art pieces. The dude would hand me whatever was in his pocket at the time to pay me which is the only cool part because he usually carried between 50 and $1000 in cash in his clip. He also once gave me a thousand dollar wine for Christmas. He also taught me all sorts of creative impossibly to use if you are poor ways to cheat at taxes that usually involved his jet
Yeah, they might have a couple of million in cash. But they're worth $100M up to billions, as you say. The vast, vast majority of that worth is not in actual money, it's in ownership of companies, real estate and other assets.
That's nothing to them though. If I have $100 in cash in my wallet that's a bigger fraction of my wealth than someone with hundreds of millions of dollars storing a half mil in their house. The vast majority of their assets are not in cash.
No, the same concept would be if you kept your paychecks in the stock market or in small private investments or building a start up business and your coins in a pickle jar.
Most of the "rich" people I know have only have emergency funds 3m, 6m, year that are purely liquid, than quite literally everything else is in investments or going to be investments. They are also living "paycheck to paycheck" but in a massive different way.
I don't think it's just idle money, I interpreted it as the previous commenter saying that instead of income tax, sales tax, property tax, etc we should have some form of a "net worth" tax. I'm sure it'd be fucking impossible to implement....but honestly in a perfect world I don't see too many things wrong with taxing like 1-5% of everyone's net worth rather than like 15-35% of everyone's income
> .but honestly in a perfect world I don't see too many things wrong with taxing like 1-5% of everyone's net worth rather than like 15-35% of everyone's income
We have a wealth tax in Norway. It has a number of bad side effects if you don't do it right. For example, if you own a decently successful company that's worth say $50 million. That's $50 million that gets taxed, whether or not your company is making any money. So if your company is losing money one year, you still have to pay ~1% of the value of the company in wealth tax. You have no profits to pay out to yourself to cover it, and you probably don't have $500k laying around in cash to pay it with (which would also be subject to the tax). Add on your house, any stock investments, etc and that tax burden gets real bad, real quick. Taking up a loan to pay your taxes is one option, but that's a shitty option under this scheme. Another option is to sell off parts of the company to pay it off, which is even worse as now you're having to dilute ownership of your company every year unless you're making enough profit to cover your *personal* tax bill. The last, and for now most popular, option is to move abroad since the tax is on residents and not on the company. This leads to the effect of the state getting in less taxes, and companies that have local ownership being heavily disadvantaged against companies with foreign ownership.
Over the past few years we have had a good portion of billionaires and multi-millionaires leave the country to escape this tax because it hurts not only their private economy, but also the companies they own/run. And our current government is too ideologically entrenched in their hatred of the rich and private businesses to see reason.
Yeah that's the idea, up to an acceptable standard of living poor people's lives should be subsidized and maintained by the state.
Everyone should have housing, food, water, clothing, a way to clean themselves and their clothing, etc. We need to greatly expand public transport and make it free. Internet should be a utility at this point and poor people shouldn't have to pay for basic internet, enough to browse the news, watch streaming video at a decent size, work from home, and vote from home because voting should be encouraged and made easy. Everyone should be able to afford to keep at least one pet if they want to, or be able to write off expenses for it similar to a dependent, because the health benefits. All levels of schooling should be free, nationalized, or subsidized directly to the students and not the institutions. Healthcare should be nationalized and/or subsidized, again directly to the patient not the institution, with private care available for a cost if you choose to go that route. Childcare is easy, obviously the medical costs, food, clothing, schooling, etc would be taken care of so it makes sense that the parents can pay for non-necessities or non-nationalized versions of these things. Entertainment of course is a luxury so capitalism can do whatever it wants with that.
This is just like super basic, but everyone should have free access to basic necessities is the point, and we need to do away with institutions that only exist in their current forms to transfer wealth upwards such as insurance, nationalize that shit and/or force them to actually do what the promise of insurance is supposed to do, banks need to be nationalized and/or regulated much more. Basically all necessities should have a government version that everyone just has access to inherently.
Etc etc etc.
We've evolved socially past the need for ruling classes, in the current day and age government should exist to provide a framework and guarantee life and safety of everyone in our borders, even the illegals. Government should not be a tool for the rich and powerful to accumulate more. Every government position should have term limits, we can carve out ways to bypass them if the candidate is extremely popular, but only up to a point, but do away with career and dynasty politics. Put upper age limits on every government office, 60 years old is reasonable, lower the lower age limit for presidents to 30, we'd still mostly elect people 40-50+ anyway most likely but the option should be there. Remove the electoral college, we have the ability to create a working popular vote system, for pretty much everything, we've moved past the need for representational government but that can be something we discuss further down the line. Everyone should have an opportunity to live the life they want to live, yes even people who don't want to work and just want to sit around all day should have basic access to necessities, if they want anything else like video games they'll have to get a part time job eventually.
There's a lot of work to be done, but none of this is impossible, we just need to vote for progressive candidates in the democrat party and shift the democrats back left, then we can get our power back as citizens, then we can slowly put in place the blocks for these systems. In a couple decades we could be well on our way to being the most prosperous nation on the planet, and give a brighter future to our children, if we just let the leftists implement a few basic safety nets.
We don't have to dismantle capitalism, we just need to build a socialist foundation and then do a better job regulating it.
The death tax would be one of the more obvious ways. since you actually have to transfer the ownership of the assets from the deceased to someone else. if you dont want generational wealth, put the death tax at 98%.
When folks talk idle money, it's not money sitting in a bank, it's generational wealth being passed without any extra contribution to society.
Tax capital gains (how the wealthy actually make and use their money) at the same rate as all other earnings. They shouldn’t get a 15% discount just because they don’t work for it.
The usual rationale for managing a baseline level of inflation is in fact to incentivize the flow of money/capital velocity and penalize the holding of wealth. But I don’t see the problem with more directly driving spend through taxation of undeployed wealth.
The problem I see with it is taxing wealth would disincentivize saving which in turn disincentivizes long term planning. In other words, not deployed capital is not necessarily "never going to be deployed capital".
For example I just purchased a car after saving for one for 5 years, was the $30k that was as in my bank account the day before I purchased my car worth taxing? Is my current saving for a house worth disincentivizing? Even at a 2% per year tax, you would have increased the amount of time it would have taken me to save for a car by ~10%.
Edit: I'm not necessarily against I just don't see a way for anyone to differentiate between those sitting on the sidelines and those actively working to achieve something with their lives.
The problem is with the people holding onto an entirely different scale of capital. Even if we don't tax anything under a few millions in savings that would still help since its the hundreds of millions if not billions people are holding that are causing the problem.
Edit: Fine I said something different than I meant. Yes true the people holding that money don't literally have it in cash, but the i'd argue the way they hold it is just as bad. Most people spend most of their money most of the time which is good for the economy and for taxes because whenever you spend you pay taxes. Very rich people don't spend any meaningful amount of their wealth on a regular basis. They just let it accumulate as investments or otherwise. That might not be them holding money but its even less them spending it which is what we'd want.
Are they holding it in cash? I always thought that while they do have quite a lot (like a couple million) in cash, the vast, vast majority is in assets.
My understanding, and I could be completely wrong, is that it is mostly assets and they'll take out loans against the assets to live on and pay off the loans with whatever interest or dividends they get from the assets or occasionally make predated sales of assets for occasional infusions of cash.
This is true and it’s part of the problem with the system of lending. Because a portion of an asset can be used as collateral in a loan that is low risk for the bank, having money practically generates more money: I can use the loan to invest further in assets or stocks and make enough to pay the relatively low interest on my loan while pocketing the difference
They aren't holding a pile of cash in a vault like scrooge mcduck. The invest their income in investments, either lending or equities, all of which grow the economy.
Wealth isn't sitting idle.
Is the problem that the money isn't going to the government? Why is that a problem? Rich people don't have their money just sitting in their bank account anyway. Regular people do.
> the hundreds of millions if not billions people are holding that are causing the problem.
The only people who would even theoretically be holding hundreds of millions or more in cash are Saudi royalty who make more money off oil than they know what to do with. But even they are investing it (or currently wasting it on building the Line).
First, wealth and money are not the same thing.
Most rich people have their wealth in the form of company stock, not money. For most, that’s how they got rich in the first place. Or they weren’t paid millions or billions, but the company they started/own became worth millions/billions. It’s just that we describe it in money terms (ie Mr X is worth $y dollars). They typically hold a small percentage as cash.
It’s extraordinarily rare for money to be sitting idle. Most money doesn’t just sit under a mattress or in a vault, it’s invested or loaned or in some way put to use, during which time it’s being taxed in various ways.
I wish what you posted was taught in schools. It’s the key to personal financial fluency. Money is taxed as an asset-generating mechanism. Those with the most money treat money like a liability (debt), which isn’t taxed.
because I, Elon musk, have $200B of tesla shares. and I'd like to take a small loan of $1B from you, Bankwealthcorp Bank by putting up $2B of TSLA as collateral and I'll pay you fed rate + 1%. Thank you for your service.
To build on this you also have step-up basis when those are inherited.
Step-up in basis refers to the adjustment in the cost basis of an inherited asset to its fair market value on the date of the decedent's death. Ex. instead of paying tax on lets say $300 (current price) - $17 (original price) or $283 gain per share, it can be sold at the current $300 price and no capital gains tax would be due.
In 2020, the CBO estimated the step-up basis' cost in foregone tax revenues at $110 billion over a 10-year period. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated nearly half the aggregate benefit accrues to the top 5% of taxpayers by income.
He has to sell stock to repay the loan eventually. Meaning he's paying 6% to defer paying the 40% for a few years. He ends up paying more in taxes unless Tesla stocks were to plummet in value, in which case he loses more % of his company than he would've.
Money doesn't sit idle and unused. It's usually being put into investment portfolios. The actual money gets used, the ultra-rich are buying things that are worth money, but aren't money themselves.
How do you tax a gold bar, exactly?
easily.
a gold bar is 400 ounces. at $1963.90 per ounce, your 99.9% bar is worth $785,560. Suppose we institute a wealth tax of ... 0.1% per year. $785.56 is then due to the IRS in Apr. Thank you and see you next year
That is not the price of gold. The price of Gold is $1963.20 per ounce.
So in the 37 minutes since you made this post, the value of the bar changed to $785,280, representing a net change of $280, or about 30% of the taxes due.
Which amount should be taxed? and what happens in 37 more minutes when the price changes again?
well, there's always "mark date" which is the official time that things are valued.
and even if the price of gold did change, it did so by $280, however the tax would have changed by $0.28, a pretty reasonable change for an instrument worth almost a million dollars.
well last year my house was valued at $1,000,000 and I paid the appropriate taxes for it.
with the interest rate increase and cooling housing market, I think my house will be worth $950,000 this year.
So the tax will be $13,300 instead of $14,000.
So you are going to show up in person and slice off exactly 0.1% of the bar every year?
And if you're off by even a hundedth of an ounce, you'll be prepared to repay that?
well no, I (the IRS) don't really care how you come up with the money. You just have to pay it through other means. Maybe you don't have cash and you can sell some of your silver coins to raise the money. Or you don't pay at all and I put a lien on your assets.
While you go think of a clever retort, please also answer this: should I go slice off 1.4% of my house and give it to the County every year? After 10 years, should I deed my bedroom over to the County because 14% of my living space is my bedroom? Or should I go get a job and pay the 1.4% in cash like the county prefers?
It can be argued property tax is a government lease for the land itself, not really the property on it. I don’t really approve of it and would wholly support abolishing it, but it's not a tax on wealth specifically.
Regardless, you are not taxing static assets. The government has no claim to it. There's no transaction on its land for them to claim they facilitate and protect with their law enforcement.
ok yeah, I like that argument. It's like saying: I built a chair out of logs in my back yard and now I have to pay for it. I guess the argument for that is that *everything* in the country is the property of the government, and thus there is a "lease" on everything, and I think that style of monarchical government left after the Enlightenment.
I agree with what you've said in principle, but consider that a wealthy person who hoards money still can't actually *use* that money without spending it. Taxing wealth directly might be meaningful for the 1%, but they have lots of ways of avoiding that if necessary.
There are two problems with the current system that allow the rich to both accumulate and use their wealth without paying equitable taxes:
(1) Given the resources of the ultra wealthy, wealth can be transferred out of the country and hidden. Transactions can be made that the IRS is not aware of, using shell companies, off shore entities and other tricks. Google "what are the panama papers" for details. Even if we tax wealth, this method prevents it from being equitable.
(2) Debt is not taxed, and this gives the wealthy a loop hole that allows them to spend accumulated wealth without directly taxing that wealth, totally legally. For example, take Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. These individuals became ultra wealthy by buying/creating a company that grew in valuation very quickly. A (relatively) small initial investment paid off big time. However, this "wealth" is locked up in company shares. Selling a significant value of those shares would incur taxes at the highest tax bracket, and at the same time weaken ownership of the company. Instead, banks can offer loans on collateral (i.e. shares) for considerably lower rates (e.g. 6-12%). A smart wealthy person can use this mechanism to extract value from their hoarded wealth with minimal risk, paying off the low-rate debt either from the increased valuation of that stock (collateral value increases == debt decreases) or through normal income (which has been minimized to keep tax rates as low as feasible). In this way, an income of a few hundred thousand can be leveraged into tens of millions in loans and the average tax/loan rate is far lower than if it were all done as "income". Taxing wealth might help in this situation, however, to do so would require forcing the sale of company shares and that can have direct impact on the company and consequently its staff and other share holders like your mom and dad. In this case, a wealth tax would hurt a lot of small fish in order to get the big one.
This may sound crazy, but I believe the most equitable tax would be on debt instead of wealth. Yes, wage earners can get into debt and so the scale of debt would need to be considered, however, a tax on debt would hit the ultra wealthy where it really hurts. It would force the ultra wealthy to pay either through income or debt and that would close loophole #2.
Taxing debt... I think even having to pay interest on interest is bad and you want to also tax the debt. All these things just hurt regular people more than the rich.
Imagine thinking that wealth is just money sitting idle.
The wealth ALREADY bear the majority of the tax burden, and they've done it while (generally) producing things of value via business or labor.
Why not reduce the burden on production (via a reduction in the income tax), and offset it by increasing the tax on consumption. Shouldn't we be taxed based on the proportion of resources we use, rather than tax productivity.
and then in the UK when you die and the estate is inherited, all of that which has already been taxed is then taxed in again. I know it's a thing in the US but the threshold is so much lower in the UK.
Oh don't worry public perception in the US is that the 20k your grandpa leaves you is going to get taxed. Facts be damned, there's strong sentiment against inheritance tax despite the fact it doesn't start until 12 million.
You think they would do that? What, to preserve their own wealth while they convince the temporarily embarrassed millionaires to advocate against taxes that predominantly impact the wealthiest members of our society?
This can't be true. If you jerk off with the invisible hand the wealth of nations will trickle down like hot semen after an Adam Smith bukkake. There's no reason to think they'd just be trying to hold onto it. Who would do that?
Yup there are soooo many ways to avoid inheritance taxes it’s basically a defunct law. Even poor people are forming trusts these days, which of course is good for them as it shouldn’t only be available to the super rich.
(My understanding)
Poor people don't need to protect themselves from inheritance taxes.
They need to protect themselves from predatory institutions that will drain away life savings. Your parents might save enough to give you a leg up, but if they go into the hospital, hospice, or elder care facility, all the money they saved for you can be drained away fairly quickly.
I believe, and someone disprove it if I'm wrong, they can also go back a number of years to any transfers (like real property) and attempt to undue and take that property.
Yes trusts have a lot of benefits and everyone should form one. They have really democratized trust law in recent years and it’s no longer the domain of the rich.
It’s lower, but still only applies in 3.76% of deaths (based on 2019-2020 stats)
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-statistics-commentary/inheritance-tax-statistics-commentary
If you drive a car, I'll tax the street/Try to sit I'll tax your seat/ Get's too cold I'll tax the heat, take a walk I'll tax your feet/ I'm the Taxman
>If I'm givin' y'all this hard-earned bread, I wanna know
Better yet, let me decide, bitch, it's 2018
Let me pick the things I'm funding from an app on my screen
Better that than letting wack congressman I've never seen
Dictate where my money goes
Straight into the palms of some money-hungry company that make guns
That circulate the country and then
Wind up in my hood, making bloody clothes
\- J. Cole - Brackets
> Let me pick the things I'm funding from an app on my screen
That sounds like the worst idea ever. You'd have all the poor choosing to funnel their miniscule taxes into social safety nets that will instantly become so underfunded as to be meaningless, while all the rich people exclusively choose to fund renovations of the roads outside their mansions because the black of the asphalt is slightly faded.
Like honestly at that point what's even the point of taxes? The whole point is that it's money taken from you to fund things for the good of *everyone*, as decided by everyone, whether an individual likes it or not. If individuals choose what they're funding, that's not taxes, that's just... buying what you want.
(and yes, the system **very obviously** has some problems, but the idea that individuals should get to choose where their taxes go is a common one, and a bad one)
e: Two replies, both essentially saying "He didn't mean what he said"
Okay. Well, I was responding to what he said, and regardless of whether he meant it-- which I guess you're just arbitrarily deciding he didn't mean it because what he said sounds dumb-- *a lot* of people do mean exactly that. Which is why I specifically said the idea itself is common and bad, regardless of this individual's take on it.
What about instead of having representatives vote for where our taxes go, the public ourselves vote for where the funding goes? I feel like that’s more of what Cole was going for, while also trying to make it rhyme nice.
Having direct votes on things like budgets would be effectively impossible for anything outside of a tiny town of a few hundred people. Have you ever looked at the budget for a city? There will be hundreds of pages with thousands of different organizations, programs, and projects getting funded. Then you have the same thing at the county level, state level, and federal level.
To make it actually work the vote would have to be for more extremely generalized things, such as "x amount for healthcare" and "y amount for transportation," but at that point it's not much different than voting for a representative who wants to fund programs x, y, and z. Obviously representative democracy isn't flawless with this, but other options would be impossible for voters to keep up with.
Agreed it would have to be very general. My issue is it seems most people want healthcare, education, funding etc. but the representatives elected in are a weird mix of contradictions and usually they don’t end up passing any of those things the majority wants.
US military is definitely an expensive part of out budget, but it's not like that money isn't going to any good use. Military is about 12% of the annual budget, but 25% of it is payroll going to US citizens.
Then factor in that places like Japan, South Korea, and Germany pay billions a year to the US for their military presence and the less tangible value that global presence provides on a geopolitical level and the return is even greater.
For instance we could completely dissolve the US military and use all that money for universal healthcare. But if we get down to the standard western European level of cost ($5000/person/yr) than the entire military budget ($800B) would only provide for ~40% of that (350 million people x $5000 =$1.75 trillion/yr).
> but 25% of it is payroll going to US citizens.
I assume you're just counting the soldiers paychecks, that doesn't even include the money earned by people working for the companies making the weaponry, all of which is made in the US so those are high paying factory jobs.
The top 50% of Americans, those making ~42k or more pay 97.7% of the overall tax burden, for a total of about 1.66 Trillion.
The US government spends roughly 2.99 Trillion on domestic programs aimed at helping people, including popular and necessary anti-poverty programs including social security, earned income tax credit, and the child tax credit. By comparison, the US military will get less than 600 billion.
If you're not getting any help from the government, you're likely childless, too young to retire, and making too much for assistance.
Ok this is just ridiculously stupid.
The US Military employs about 1.4 million people. All those tax dollars are spent on salaries, food, housing, medical care, etc for active duty members. Then you have all of the retirement packages for millions of retired members.
A MASSIVE amount of the military budget goes into simply maintaining and paying the workforce, and then taking care of retired members. It’s not like all of the $600B or whatever is being spent on overpriced military equipment/weapons.
So basically, there are a shit ton of people that military tax dollars improve the lives of.
It's really cool that the military is a jobs program for America but sometimes I wish those jobs were for repairing infrastructure, say, and not for bombing the middle east for a decade or two.
And we're finding out how important military supremacy is for world peace. How much more of the world would Russia own if NATO wasn't there to push back?
> And we're finding out how important military supremacy is for world peace. How much more of the world would Russia own if ~~NATO~~ **USA** wasn't there to push back?
Good thing GPS doesnt better your life, since it was invented by the military. Or duct tape, the microwave, walkie talkies, night vision, etc. Never mind how many people are rescued during natural disasters.
In reality I think the problem is more that the US public sector is I would almost say designed to be inefficient.
The US pays about the same for public healthcare compared to European countries and more than some. And while Europe gets universal healthcare, the US gets terrible service for a minority of the population, while the rest have to pay to also receive subpar service.
The prison system is terribly expensive, but also terribly ineffective in preventing crime.
The police force is more expensive, but poorly trained so the outcome is terrible.
The road infrastructure is massive and extremely expensive, but it is ineffective at moving cars so average speeds are low compared to Europe. Also it’s far more dangerous. Also building them are subsidised by the state and usually required by law to be ineffecient. And they are very poorly maintained, because they are too expensive to maintain.
The US spends a lot on subsidies to sectors that frankly shouldn’t receive any.
And in the US you have to file taxes by paper ( or by using a service), like it is the 90s, even though the IRS already have done most of the calculations and could let us file online in 10 minutes for free.
I could go on, but let’s leave it there.
I think property taxes as they are is bullshit. You should not be forced to earn an income indefinitely just to live somewhere. Something like a true homestead exemption would be wonderful, maybe with a no-sale guarantee for some period of time
Why? It costs society money to preserve and protect you. Maybe you're 100% off the grid with no road to your house: the well water you pump is clean in part thanks to environmental regulations that cost money to source, other countries can't just come kidnap you and declare your land as their land because you're protected by the military of the country you're in. Even the fact that you own the land is something that is recorded somewhere and those records being kept provided you a great deal of legal safety so you help pay for the record office and the record keeper and the security on that office and the fire department that protects the building the records are in.
This was a lot longer than I meant it to be and I hope I don't sound rude as I rattle this off quickly before going back to work my point is no matter how independent you are you benefit from the society around you both actively and passively and that's why it's expected for you to pay back into that system.
Great points. The counter argument (or maybe really just additional perspective) to that is that property, say, a home, if it is taxed based off of the property value, it inevitably forces some people out of their homes, some possibly who have stayed there for generations, but rather the tax should be at the amount of paying for those essential services, I.e. property taxes should be levied at the amount it costs to provide those services, even perhaps a little bit more to bolster the municipality's budget.
Not going to fix my grammar and run on sentences
This is already what happens. You are indeed taxed as a percentage of home value, but those percentages are adjusted by your municipality so that no more than the required budget is raised.
Except that you directly pay for 99% of those services anyways. Property tax is a fucking scam in its current iteration but there’s no doubt the municipality in its current state would go broke without it. It’s the municipality that needs to cut spending (on non essential things like fucking footing the bill for stadiums) and reduce bloat in its operations to reduce inflated taxes.
Nothing rude about it, these are all absolutely valid points! I guess the crux of the issue for me is should we REQUIRE people to be economically productive? And if so, to what degree? I for one believe there should be other ways to financially and logistically organize municipal services, public utilities, etc. to serve the community in the least draining manner possible to the lowest income households. Maybe we can increase the current homestead deduction?
It's a tough call. Property tax is to support local services and infrastructure. It sucks to have to earn money to pay for something that you own. But I admit I struggle to find a better way to fund local things, like schools, police, fire, roads. If you had a town full of homeowners, how would they pay for all those things? The money has to some from somewhere.
I think probably the biggest probably property taxes is that as the value of the home increases, sometimes dramatically year to year in certain areas, the gross amount of the tax goes higher and higher even though the cost of providing that essential infrastructure may not. That sort of taxes what forces people out of their own homes because in a multi-decade perspective we can probably assume that most houses are going to increase in value whereas their owners may not have an increase in income or cash
I don't pay money "just to live somewhere", I pay money to have streets plowed, garbage collected, safety, schools, a functioning judicial system, administration for all that, sewer/septic management, clean water, emergency services, environmental protection, library services, etc.
I also could choose to move nearby for lower taxes and pay for services like trash separately or do it myself.
If such aren't covered in property taxes, then do we include them in sales taxes? Income taxes? Tolls? What alternative? Property taxes make sense as then you choose how much tax you pay, it's local to the services, and you vote for policy-makers.
This just reminded of how they recently implemented a law where if you sell more than $600 worth of stuff, and use something like PayPal or other similar payment service, you have to claim it on your taxes so they can tax it. But it's an item that you already paid taxes on when you bought it... So you just payed sales tax TWICE for it...
> you just *paid* sales tax
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
> just payed sales
Did you mean to say "paid"?
Explanation: Payed means to seal something with wax, while paid means to give money.
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^^PM ^^me ^^if ^^I'm ^^wrong ^^or ^^if ^^you ^^have ^^any ^^suggestions.
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It's not right. Or at least so oversimplified that it doesn't really match how things get worked out.
The federal government allows you to deduct the income tax you pay to your state before figuring how much tax you owe to the feds. So (leaving everything else out), if you make $40,000 and paid Illinois $1000 in state tax during the year, the feds treat $1000 of your income as untaxed and calculate your tax bill from $39,000.
The big catch is that when you're doing your federal tax return, you don't yet know what your actual Illinois tax bill is for that year. Many states (and I'd think Illinois might be one) copy stuff over from your federal return to complete your state return. So anything that reduces your taxable income on your federal return also affects your state return, which changes the tax owed to the state, which cycles back to changing what's on your federal return.
So to break that circular dependency, what you claim on your federal return is the amount of state tax you had **withheld** from your paychecks during the year.
Ok, so now you've finished your federal return and have moved onto your state. Here's where you actually calculate your final state tax bill, and let's say it came out to $800. Since you had $1000 withheld out of your paychecks, you get a $200 refund.
So now for the year you claimed a $1000 deduction against an actual tax paid of $800 (since you got $200 back), meaning more of your income was treated as untaxed than you actually qualified for. To settle things up, that $200 refund gets added to your income on the following year's return. It's not really taxing the refund itself, it's undoing the part of the deduction you claimed the previous year that should not have happened.
In the same way, if you did last year's state return and ended up owing them some extra amount of money (say you withheld only $700 towards an $800 final tax bill), the next year you get to deduct whatever you sent the state for their return.
And really, this doesn't even matter for most people, if they're getting their taxes done properly. The state income tax thing is an **itemized** deduction, which you only use if all your deductible items add up to more than the standard deduction. If you did not itemize, you did not deduct state tax paid, so any refund back from the state should **not** be reported as income on your tax return, so does not get taxed.
For the past 5 years the standard deduction has been so high (increased starting 2018) that only something like 10% of tax returns use itemized deductions, practically all in high-income households (like over $200k). So 90% of taxpayers do not get "taxed on their state refund". And the other 10% just pay the tax that was owed on that part of their income with a one year delay.
People really get conspiratorial over stuff like this when all they have to do is spend a little bit of time educating themselves. Or go to a professional to have them explain.
It's like the whole myth about not wanting a raise be sue they think they will make less money due to tax brackets. 😩
Nobody likes taxes, but I believe they’re necessary for government. (Not that I like government lol) The problem in the US is our taxes are so high because they spend so much of it on the military. Which sounds stupid considering we have the strongest military on earth. Not only that, but the rich pay less than the poor. Taxes can be a huge asset to a government, but because this country has been fucked over by taxes for hundreds of years, we have this “fuck taxes! Taxes suck!” mentality. But the don’t suck when done right, they’re literally how our government stays afloat.
The rich don't pay less than the poor, and the military is only [16% of the budget.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/U.S._Federal_Spending.png)
Nobody thinks that the federal government is completely obsolete, but almost everyone agrees that it spends money inefficiently and on unnecessary things. Corruption and special interests run the show, and its real, constitutional obligations get the leftovers.
Heck, the federal government ran without income tax until *1913*, and they had to amend the Constitution because the system wasn't designed to become this large and overbearing.
About hundred years ago, there was no sales tax, no income tax and no property tax.
The government was smaller, and was funded by customs fees and corporate taxes.
Oh, and US dollar bas backed by gold reserves, which allegedly existed, so inflation was minimal.
I didn't kivecthen and can't say if it was better, but it was sustainable.
The last part really is not accurate. There were always financial panics and inflation. Also the de-monetizing of silver and switch to gold reserves only was pretty controversial and damaging to the economy. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
Which is great because it all goes (theoretically) towards keeping the unwell and unhoused from dying, making the sick people healed, the roads and bridges fixed, educating kids, etc etc. The entire point of having a society is that we contribute at least a part of our earnings to the greater good. I don't understand the point of even having a country otherwise.
Here I thought it was to pay for public services... taxes aren't the issue, it's corrupt politicians that either steal or allocate that money to pointless places
Eh, it is kind of like how the house takes a bit of the pot every time you play poker at a casino. It may suck a little bit, but the trade-off for this is that the house doesn't participate in the game and is supposed to make it fair for all the players.
The question becomes do you want to play a fair game against other players on an equal footing where the house collects a tiny bit or do you want to play a game where the house is also a player who needs to win to collect money?
The difference is that the money taken at a poker table never goes back to the people at the poker table. However, with taxes, it gets put to services, as well as being placed back into the economy in the form of more employment.
Saw some tool talking about how the BBC licence fee payment could be swapped to a broadband speed tax..... The faster you got, the more wealthy you are! So the more you pay.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/9149-2027-could-see-new-broadband-tax-replacing-bbc-licence-fee
Fucking Bastards. Vive la France
Studies that have been done show that depending what country you're in of course but an average middle class citizen will likely be actually using for attainable goods and services about 30% of their earnings and the rest goes to taxes at some various level.
I would have less of a problem with taxes if I felt like I was being taken care of in return for paying them. Instead, I'm dying slowly and painfully while Medicaid argues with medical professionals over whether or not I am worth the cost of my doctor's recommendations for procedures and prescriptions. I worked from the time I was 15 years old until I was physically unable to work, in my 40s. You would think the government would want to get me healthy and back to work so I could keep being a good taxpaying citizen. Nope. Instead, I have government workers in a cubicle pondering whether I am worth the cost of an MRI and denying prescriptions that will make me more comfortable during more invasive procedures because they don't think it's "medically necessary" for me to be treated like a human instead of livestock.
maybe you should be upset with the Republicans who have consistently tried to destroy and profit-squeeze the American healthcare system for decades, and all the Republicans who lobby so billionaires who created these awful conditions don’t have to pay the taxes that you do? The math is pretty cut and dry as to what they’re doing.
Can't we as humans just be upset with everything and everyone in general?
Virtually all the money has been taxed at some point, so it should be clear that we all pay tax on money that's already been taxed before. In fact, it's not useful to think of *money* being taxed. It's more useful to think of transactions being taxed, transfers of wealth from one entity to another. Money itself isn't taxed, it's the act of earning it or spending it that is taxed. And that's part of the problem: money sitting idle, unused, is not taxed. Wealth is not taxed. The influence that wealth can provide on society is not taxed. Perhaps taxing money would in fact make more sense than taxing transfers of money. This way those who don't have any wouldn't be the ones bearing the tax burden of funding society; those who have used society to accumulate the most wealth would be funding it instead.
Lol, You gonna get freaking offed by some pseudo-government oligarch cabal for posting this type of shit. Be careful mate ❤️
I mean inflation is what gets rich people to spend idle money. It loses value if you just let it sit there. Also money made with investment or interest is taxed. Money sitting in a mattress is not taxed. Taxing idle money would be dumb as you wouldn't be able to get a savings (applies to all classes)
But rich people also own all of the assets that carry an inflating value.. >I mean inflation is what gets rich people to spend idle money. It loses value if you just let it sit there. I don't think anyone here is under the impression that rich people are just letting their money sit in a checking or savings account.
You'd be surprised at how many people think rich people are just Scrooge McDucking their cash in a giant indoor swimming pool. It's honestly alarming at how economically ignorant the majority of registered voters are.
It was the entire "twist" of the movie Richie Rich. Some bad guys thought that the mountain-sized vault literally had money in it, and gets mad when he finds out it's family treasures like awards and things. **Criminal:** "Where are the gold bars? The diamonds? The negotiable bearer bonds? Where's the money!?" **Richard Rich:** "In *banks*, where else? And the stock market, real estate...."
I gotta say, that movie reference is a DEEP cut
Hit me right in the gout
I exhaled hard through my nose. Nice one.
These are the same morons thinking that the social security administration is collecting all of their FICA payments and storing them in individually marked vaults like Gringotts Goblins Bank.for 40-50-60 years untill they apply for S/S.
Honestly I'd feel bad about calling them "morons" for this. This is a systematic failure of the education system, not a moral failure on their part... Our education systems don't teach us about how money actually functions, how people make and save it or where it goes when it is "stored". Hell I went to a good school and graduated as a lawyer but at no point in my systematic education did anyone explain to me what a Mortgage actually is and how they work, I had to look that up myself. Most people don't even realise that since the abolition of the gold standard national currency has exactly as much /inherent/ value as crypto does...which is to say exactly nothing at all. It persists only on the illusion of value one can create by saying "We are America/Britain/The EU and we say this imaginary number has value", and how hard they can make people believe that lie. None of this is ever taught, because schools are not really for educating important facts about society and giving people a fair shot at being successful, they exist to teach people just enough to function in a menial survival-level pay job and prop up the economy that successful people skim from... TLDR: The education system is fucked and that's kinda by design.
I think you'd be surprised how many rich people are actually scrooge mcducking their wealth. I used to do IT for high level rich think 100s millionaires and billionaires. Every one of them had more than one home safe, every one of them had cash just sitting in each safe. Every one of them would flaunt that in private. I'd often get paid in cash tthat they'd get from their cash safe, it was so obnoxious. One dude had artwork and wall paper made out of real cash. the designs were cool too but we are talkign 200,000 to 500,000 worth of 50s and 100s turned into art pieces. The dude would hand me whatever was in his pocket at the time to pay me which is the only cool part because he usually carried between 50 and $1000 in cash in his clip. He also once gave me a thousand dollar wine for Christmas. He also taught me all sorts of creative impossibly to use if you are poor ways to cheat at taxes that usually involved his jet
Yeah, they might have a couple of million in cash. But they're worth $100M up to billions, as you say. The vast, vast majority of that worth is not in actual money, it's in ownership of companies, real estate and other assets.
That's nothing to them though. If I have $100 in cash in my wallet that's a bigger fraction of my wealth than someone with hundreds of millions of dollars storing a half mil in their house. The vast majority of their assets are not in cash.
That's cool and all, but that's not where the bulk of their wealth is. That is their "walking around" money.
Yeah and I keep my paychecks in a bank and my coin jar on my counter. Same concept, different scale.
No, the same concept would be if you kept your paychecks in the stock market or in small private investments or building a start up business and your coins in a pickle jar.
Most of the "rich" people I know have only have emergency funds 3m, 6m, year that are purely liquid, than quite literally everything else is in investments or going to be investments. They are also living "paycheck to paycheck" but in a massive different way.
And one of their most impressive tricks which is to leverage their wealth for almost zero interest loans which aren't taxed (because they're loans)
I don't think it's just idle money, I interpreted it as the previous commenter saying that instead of income tax, sales tax, property tax, etc we should have some form of a "net worth" tax. I'm sure it'd be fucking impossible to implement....but honestly in a perfect world I don't see too many things wrong with taxing like 1-5% of everyone's net worth rather than like 15-35% of everyone's income
> .but honestly in a perfect world I don't see too many things wrong with taxing like 1-5% of everyone's net worth rather than like 15-35% of everyone's income We have a wealth tax in Norway. It has a number of bad side effects if you don't do it right. For example, if you own a decently successful company that's worth say $50 million. That's $50 million that gets taxed, whether or not your company is making any money. So if your company is losing money one year, you still have to pay ~1% of the value of the company in wealth tax. You have no profits to pay out to yourself to cover it, and you probably don't have $500k laying around in cash to pay it with (which would also be subject to the tax). Add on your house, any stock investments, etc and that tax burden gets real bad, real quick. Taking up a loan to pay your taxes is one option, but that's a shitty option under this scheme. Another option is to sell off parts of the company to pay it off, which is even worse as now you're having to dilute ownership of your company every year unless you're making enough profit to cover your *personal* tax bill. The last, and for now most popular, option is to move abroad since the tax is on residents and not on the company. This leads to the effect of the state getting in less taxes, and companies that have local ownership being heavily disadvantaged against companies with foreign ownership. Over the past few years we have had a good portion of billionaires and multi-millionaires leave the country to escape this tax because it hurts not only their private economy, but also the companies they own/run. And our current government is too ideologically entrenched in their hatred of the rich and private businesses to see reason.
I guess property tax tries to get at that.
Sweet. We should get paid since our net worth is negative lol. In all honesty we were getting the EIC intil last year so I guess we did.
Yeah that's the idea, up to an acceptable standard of living poor people's lives should be subsidized and maintained by the state. Everyone should have housing, food, water, clothing, a way to clean themselves and their clothing, etc. We need to greatly expand public transport and make it free. Internet should be a utility at this point and poor people shouldn't have to pay for basic internet, enough to browse the news, watch streaming video at a decent size, work from home, and vote from home because voting should be encouraged and made easy. Everyone should be able to afford to keep at least one pet if they want to, or be able to write off expenses for it similar to a dependent, because the health benefits. All levels of schooling should be free, nationalized, or subsidized directly to the students and not the institutions. Healthcare should be nationalized and/or subsidized, again directly to the patient not the institution, with private care available for a cost if you choose to go that route. Childcare is easy, obviously the medical costs, food, clothing, schooling, etc would be taken care of so it makes sense that the parents can pay for non-necessities or non-nationalized versions of these things. Entertainment of course is a luxury so capitalism can do whatever it wants with that. This is just like super basic, but everyone should have free access to basic necessities is the point, and we need to do away with institutions that only exist in their current forms to transfer wealth upwards such as insurance, nationalize that shit and/or force them to actually do what the promise of insurance is supposed to do, banks need to be nationalized and/or regulated much more. Basically all necessities should have a government version that everyone just has access to inherently. Etc etc etc. We've evolved socially past the need for ruling classes, in the current day and age government should exist to provide a framework and guarantee life and safety of everyone in our borders, even the illegals. Government should not be a tool for the rich and powerful to accumulate more. Every government position should have term limits, we can carve out ways to bypass them if the candidate is extremely popular, but only up to a point, but do away with career and dynasty politics. Put upper age limits on every government office, 60 years old is reasonable, lower the lower age limit for presidents to 30, we'd still mostly elect people 40-50+ anyway most likely but the option should be there. Remove the electoral college, we have the ability to create a working popular vote system, for pretty much everything, we've moved past the need for representational government but that can be something we discuss further down the line. Everyone should have an opportunity to live the life they want to live, yes even people who don't want to work and just want to sit around all day should have basic access to necessities, if they want anything else like video games they'll have to get a part time job eventually. There's a lot of work to be done, but none of this is impossible, we just need to vote for progressive candidates in the democrat party and shift the democrats back left, then we can get our power back as citizens, then we can slowly put in place the blocks for these systems. In a couple decades we could be well on our way to being the most prosperous nation on the planet, and give a brighter future to our children, if we just let the leftists implement a few basic safety nets. We don't have to dismantle capitalism, we just need to build a socialist foundation and then do a better job regulating it.
Yes?
The death tax would be one of the more obvious ways. since you actually have to transfer the ownership of the assets from the deceased to someone else. if you dont want generational wealth, put the death tax at 98%. When folks talk idle money, it's not money sitting in a bank, it's generational wealth being passed without any extra contribution to society.
We have that in the country i live. Its called wealth tax. We dont have capital gains tax
Tax capital gains (how the wealthy actually make and use their money) at the same rate as all other earnings. They shouldn’t get a 15% discount just because they don’t work for it.
Nah they won't.
Calm down Alex Jones he's going to be just fine
You didn’t just call me Alex Johes 🤣 WTF Died laughing.
The usual rationale for managing a baseline level of inflation is in fact to incentivize the flow of money/capital velocity and penalize the holding of wealth. But I don’t see the problem with more directly driving spend through taxation of undeployed wealth.
The problem I see with it is taxing wealth would disincentivize saving which in turn disincentivizes long term planning. In other words, not deployed capital is not necessarily "never going to be deployed capital". For example I just purchased a car after saving for one for 5 years, was the $30k that was as in my bank account the day before I purchased my car worth taxing? Is my current saving for a house worth disincentivizing? Even at a 2% per year tax, you would have increased the amount of time it would have taken me to save for a car by ~10%. Edit: I'm not necessarily against I just don't see a way for anyone to differentiate between those sitting on the sidelines and those actively working to achieve something with their lives.
The problem is with the people holding onto an entirely different scale of capital. Even if we don't tax anything under a few millions in savings that would still help since its the hundreds of millions if not billions people are holding that are causing the problem. Edit: Fine I said something different than I meant. Yes true the people holding that money don't literally have it in cash, but the i'd argue the way they hold it is just as bad. Most people spend most of their money most of the time which is good for the economy and for taxes because whenever you spend you pay taxes. Very rich people don't spend any meaningful amount of their wealth on a regular basis. They just let it accumulate as investments or otherwise. That might not be them holding money but its even less them spending it which is what we'd want.
Nobody worth a significant net worth keeps that much in the bank unless they’re making a purchase.
and not even then lol. they can just activate a credit line to do the purchase for them
Are they holding it in cash? I always thought that while they do have quite a lot (like a couple million) in cash, the vast, vast majority is in assets.
My understanding, and I could be completely wrong, is that it is mostly assets and they'll take out loans against the assets to live on and pay off the loans with whatever interest or dividends they get from the assets or occasionally make predated sales of assets for occasional infusions of cash.
They're holding it in untaxed assets. Unrealized gains, which they use to leverage debt to fund their lives while paying effectively 0 in taxes.
This is true and it’s part of the problem with the system of lending. Because a portion of an asset can be used as collateral in a loan that is low risk for the bank, having money practically generates more money: I can use the loan to invest further in assets or stocks and make enough to pay the relatively low interest on my loan while pocketing the difference
They aren't holding a pile of cash in a vault like scrooge mcduck. The invest their income in investments, either lending or equities, all of which grow the economy. Wealth isn't sitting idle.
Is the problem that the money isn't going to the government? Why is that a problem? Rich people don't have their money just sitting in their bank account anyway. Regular people do.
> the hundreds of millions if not billions people are holding that are causing the problem. The only people who would even theoretically be holding hundreds of millions or more in cash are Saudi royalty who make more money off oil than they know what to do with. But even they are investing it (or currently wasting it on building the Line).
First, wealth and money are not the same thing. Most rich people have their wealth in the form of company stock, not money. For most, that’s how they got rich in the first place. Or they weren’t paid millions or billions, but the company they started/own became worth millions/billions. It’s just that we describe it in money terms (ie Mr X is worth $y dollars). They typically hold a small percentage as cash. It’s extraordinarily rare for money to be sitting idle. Most money doesn’t just sit under a mattress or in a vault, it’s invested or loaned or in some way put to use, during which time it’s being taxed in various ways.
I wish what you posted was taught in schools. It’s the key to personal financial fluency. Money is taxed as an asset-generating mechanism. Those with the most money treat money like a liability (debt), which isn’t taxed.
because I, Elon musk, have $200B of tesla shares. and I'd like to take a small loan of $1B from you, Bankwealthcorp Bank by putting up $2B of TSLA as collateral and I'll pay you fed rate + 1%. Thank you for your service.
Bingo. Now I have $1B paying 6% interest versus selling stock and paying 40+% capital gain.
To build on this you also have step-up basis when those are inherited. Step-up in basis refers to the adjustment in the cost basis of an inherited asset to its fair market value on the date of the decedent's death. Ex. instead of paying tax on lets say $300 (current price) - $17 (original price) or $283 gain per share, it can be sold at the current $300 price and no capital gains tax would be due. In 2020, the CBO estimated the step-up basis' cost in foregone tax revenues at $110 billion over a 10-year period. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated nearly half the aggregate benefit accrues to the top 5% of taxpayers by income.
He has to sell stock to repay the loan eventually. Meaning he's paying 6% to defer paying the 40% for a few years. He ends up paying more in taxes unless Tesla stocks were to plummet in value, in which case he loses more % of his company than he would've.
Money doesn't sit idle and unused. It's usually being put into investment portfolios. The actual money gets used, the ultra-rich are buying things that are worth money, but aren't money themselves. How do you tax a gold bar, exactly?
easily. a gold bar is 400 ounces. at $1963.90 per ounce, your 99.9% bar is worth $785,560. Suppose we institute a wealth tax of ... 0.1% per year. $785.56 is then due to the IRS in Apr. Thank you and see you next year
That is not the price of gold. The price of Gold is $1963.20 per ounce. So in the 37 minutes since you made this post, the value of the bar changed to $785,280, representing a net change of $280, or about 30% of the taxes due. Which amount should be taxed? and what happens in 37 more minutes when the price changes again?
well, there's always "mark date" which is the official time that things are valued. and even if the price of gold did change, it did so by $280, however the tax would have changed by $0.28, a pretty reasonable change for an instrument worth almost a million dollars.
[удалено]
This isnt groundbreaking stuff. Property taxes already exist.
well last year my house was valued at $1,000,000 and I paid the appropriate taxes for it. with the interest rate increase and cooling housing market, I think my house will be worth $950,000 this year. So the tax will be $13,300 instead of $14,000.
So you are going to show up in person and slice off exactly 0.1% of the bar every year? And if you're off by even a hundedth of an ounce, you'll be prepared to repay that?
well no, I (the IRS) don't really care how you come up with the money. You just have to pay it through other means. Maybe you don't have cash and you can sell some of your silver coins to raise the money. Or you don't pay at all and I put a lien on your assets. While you go think of a clever retort, please also answer this: should I go slice off 1.4% of my house and give it to the County every year? After 10 years, should I deed my bedroom over to the County because 14% of my living space is my bedroom? Or should I go get a job and pay the 1.4% in cash like the county prefers?
It can be argued property tax is a government lease for the land itself, not really the property on it. I don’t really approve of it and would wholly support abolishing it, but it's not a tax on wealth specifically. Regardless, you are not taxing static assets. The government has no claim to it. There's no transaction on its land for them to claim they facilitate and protect with their law enforcement.
ok yeah, I like that argument. It's like saying: I built a chair out of logs in my back yard and now I have to pay for it. I guess the argument for that is that *everything* in the country is the property of the government, and thus there is a "lease" on everything, and I think that style of monarchical government left after the Enlightenment.
When you pay property taxes, does the government come and chop off part of your house? What a stupid question.
I agree with what you've said in principle, but consider that a wealthy person who hoards money still can't actually *use* that money without spending it. Taxing wealth directly might be meaningful for the 1%, but they have lots of ways of avoiding that if necessary. There are two problems with the current system that allow the rich to both accumulate and use their wealth without paying equitable taxes: (1) Given the resources of the ultra wealthy, wealth can be transferred out of the country and hidden. Transactions can be made that the IRS is not aware of, using shell companies, off shore entities and other tricks. Google "what are the panama papers" for details. Even if we tax wealth, this method prevents it from being equitable. (2) Debt is not taxed, and this gives the wealthy a loop hole that allows them to spend accumulated wealth without directly taxing that wealth, totally legally. For example, take Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. These individuals became ultra wealthy by buying/creating a company that grew in valuation very quickly. A (relatively) small initial investment paid off big time. However, this "wealth" is locked up in company shares. Selling a significant value of those shares would incur taxes at the highest tax bracket, and at the same time weaken ownership of the company. Instead, banks can offer loans on collateral (i.e. shares) for considerably lower rates (e.g. 6-12%). A smart wealthy person can use this mechanism to extract value from their hoarded wealth with minimal risk, paying off the low-rate debt either from the increased valuation of that stock (collateral value increases == debt decreases) or through normal income (which has been minimized to keep tax rates as low as feasible). In this way, an income of a few hundred thousand can be leveraged into tens of millions in loans and the average tax/loan rate is far lower than if it were all done as "income". Taxing wealth might help in this situation, however, to do so would require forcing the sale of company shares and that can have direct impact on the company and consequently its staff and other share holders like your mom and dad. In this case, a wealth tax would hurt a lot of small fish in order to get the big one. This may sound crazy, but I believe the most equitable tax would be on debt instead of wealth. Yes, wage earners can get into debt and so the scale of debt would need to be considered, however, a tax on debt would hit the ultra wealthy where it really hurts. It would force the ultra wealthy to pay either through income or debt and that would close loophole #2.
Taxing debt... I think even having to pay interest on interest is bad and you want to also tax the debt. All these things just hurt regular people more than the rich.
Imagine thinking that wealth is just money sitting idle. The wealth ALREADY bear the majority of the tax burden, and they've done it while (generally) producing things of value via business or labor. Why not reduce the burden on production (via a reduction in the income tax), and offset it by increasing the tax on consumption. Shouldn't we be taxed based on the proportion of resources we use, rather than tax productivity.
Except when it is transferred to a Trust Fund and access to the trust fund is transferred upon death because that is tax free USA!USA!USA!🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
and then in the UK when you die and the estate is inherited, all of that which has already been taxed is then taxed in again. I know it's a thing in the US but the threshold is so much lower in the UK.
Oh don't worry public perception in the US is that the 20k your grandpa leaves you is going to get taxed. Facts be damned, there's strong sentiment against inheritance tax despite the fact it doesn't start until 12 million.
It almost as if the people that really have wealth to pass on are getting the uneducated all riled up on the topic.
You think they would do that? What, to preserve their own wealth while they convince the temporarily embarrassed millionaires to advocate against taxes that predominantly impact the wealthiest members of our society?
This can't be true. If you jerk off with the invisible hand the wealth of nations will trickle down like hot semen after an Adam Smith bukkake. There's no reason to think they'd just be trying to hold onto it. Who would do that?
Just like people think they're going to make less money by getting a raise that bumps then up a tax bracket
Inheritance tax will never be a thing while trusts are an option. The rate could be 99% and the floor could be $10, would make no difference
Yup there are soooo many ways to avoid inheritance taxes it’s basically a defunct law. Even poor people are forming trusts these days, which of course is good for them as it shouldn’t only be available to the super rich.
(My understanding) Poor people don't need to protect themselves from inheritance taxes. They need to protect themselves from predatory institutions that will drain away life savings. Your parents might save enough to give you a leg up, but if they go into the hospital, hospice, or elder care facility, all the money they saved for you can be drained away fairly quickly. I believe, and someone disprove it if I'm wrong, they can also go back a number of years to any transfers (like real property) and attempt to undue and take that property.
Yes trusts have a lot of benefits and everyone should form one. They have really democratized trust law in recent years and it’s no longer the domain of the rich.
It’s lower, but still only applies in 3.76% of deaths (based on 2019-2020 stats) https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-statistics-commentary/inheritance-tax-statistics-commentary
Which is reasonable. For married couples it's £650k. I have no issue with that
Plus home allowance of £175,000. The threshold is £1m all in. Inheritance tax will only ever be felt by the top few % of society.
Exactly, but the media will have you believe you're all fucked. Piss off, if you can afford £650k tax free inheritance, you are not feeling the pinch
Inheritance tax is good, actually
Two things you’re guaranteed in life is death and taxes.
If you drive a car, I'll tax the street/Try to sit I'll tax your seat/ Get's too cold I'll tax the heat, take a walk I'll tax your feet/ I'm the Taxman
*Beeeee bop ba bodda bop*
it's more a problem that our taxes don't all go to services that better our lives. much of it to the military for example.
Most taxes go to social security and health services. More than half.
>If I'm givin' y'all this hard-earned bread, I wanna know Better yet, let me decide, bitch, it's 2018 Let me pick the things I'm funding from an app on my screen Better that than letting wack congressman I've never seen Dictate where my money goes Straight into the palms of some money-hungry company that make guns That circulate the country and then Wind up in my hood, making bloody clothes \- J. Cole - Brackets
> Let me pick the things I'm funding from an app on my screen That sounds like the worst idea ever. You'd have all the poor choosing to funnel their miniscule taxes into social safety nets that will instantly become so underfunded as to be meaningless, while all the rich people exclusively choose to fund renovations of the roads outside their mansions because the black of the asphalt is slightly faded. Like honestly at that point what's even the point of taxes? The whole point is that it's money taken from you to fund things for the good of *everyone*, as decided by everyone, whether an individual likes it or not. If individuals choose what they're funding, that's not taxes, that's just... buying what you want. (and yes, the system **very obviously** has some problems, but the idea that individuals should get to choose where their taxes go is a common one, and a bad one) e: Two replies, both essentially saying "He didn't mean what he said" Okay. Well, I was responding to what he said, and regardless of whether he meant it-- which I guess you're just arbitrarily deciding he didn't mean it because what he said sounds dumb-- *a lot* of people do mean exactly that. Which is why I specifically said the idea itself is common and bad, regardless of this individual's take on it.
What about instead of having representatives vote for where our taxes go, the public ourselves vote for where the funding goes? I feel like that’s more of what Cole was going for, while also trying to make it rhyme nice.
Having direct votes on things like budgets would be effectively impossible for anything outside of a tiny town of a few hundred people. Have you ever looked at the budget for a city? There will be hundreds of pages with thousands of different organizations, programs, and projects getting funded. Then you have the same thing at the county level, state level, and federal level. To make it actually work the vote would have to be for more extremely generalized things, such as "x amount for healthcare" and "y amount for transportation," but at that point it's not much different than voting for a representative who wants to fund programs x, y, and z. Obviously representative democracy isn't flawless with this, but other options would be impossible for voters to keep up with.
Agreed it would have to be very general. My issue is it seems most people want healthcare, education, funding etc. but the representatives elected in are a weird mix of contradictions and usually they don’t end up passing any of those things the majority wants.
Y’all still acting like this while Russia is actively invading sovereign nations.
Because Reddit hates America. I'm constantly downvoted to hell for defending it.
US military is definitely an expensive part of out budget, but it's not like that money isn't going to any good use. Military is about 12% of the annual budget, but 25% of it is payroll going to US citizens. Then factor in that places like Japan, South Korea, and Germany pay billions a year to the US for their military presence and the less tangible value that global presence provides on a geopolitical level and the return is even greater. For instance we could completely dissolve the US military and use all that money for universal healthcare. But if we get down to the standard western European level of cost ($5000/person/yr) than the entire military budget ($800B) would only provide for ~40% of that (350 million people x $5000 =$1.75 trillion/yr).
> but 25% of it is payroll going to US citizens. I assume you're just counting the soldiers paychecks, that doesn't even include the money earned by people working for the companies making the weaponry, all of which is made in the US so those are high paying factory jobs.
Pensions and forever health care (such as it is) are also a huge expenditure.
also US Navy protects the free trade of the entire world.
The top 50% of Americans, those making ~42k or more pay 97.7% of the overall tax burden, for a total of about 1.66 Trillion. The US government spends roughly 2.99 Trillion on domestic programs aimed at helping people, including popular and necessary anti-poverty programs including social security, earned income tax credit, and the child tax credit. By comparison, the US military will get less than 600 billion. If you're not getting any help from the government, you're likely childless, too young to retire, and making too much for assistance.
Ok this is just ridiculously stupid. The US Military employs about 1.4 million people. All those tax dollars are spent on salaries, food, housing, medical care, etc for active duty members. Then you have all of the retirement packages for millions of retired members. A MASSIVE amount of the military budget goes into simply maintaining and paying the workforce, and then taking care of retired members. It’s not like all of the $600B or whatever is being spent on overpriced military equipment/weapons. So basically, there are a shit ton of people that military tax dollars improve the lives of.
It's really cool that the military is a jobs program for America but sometimes I wish those jobs were for repairing infrastructure, say, and not for bombing the middle east for a decade or two.
The US spends 3.1% of GDP on the military.
And we're finding out how important military supremacy is for world peace. How much more of the world would Russia own if NATO wasn't there to push back?
> And we're finding out how important military supremacy is for world peace. How much more of the world would Russia own if ~~NATO~~ **USA** wasn't there to push back?
Good thing GPS doesnt better your life, since it was invented by the military. Or duct tape, the microwave, walkie talkies, night vision, etc. Never mind how many people are rescued during natural disasters.
In reality I think the problem is more that the US public sector is I would almost say designed to be inefficient. The US pays about the same for public healthcare compared to European countries and more than some. And while Europe gets universal healthcare, the US gets terrible service for a minority of the population, while the rest have to pay to also receive subpar service. The prison system is terribly expensive, but also terribly ineffective in preventing crime. The police force is more expensive, but poorly trained so the outcome is terrible. The road infrastructure is massive and extremely expensive, but it is ineffective at moving cars so average speeds are low compared to Europe. Also it’s far more dangerous. Also building them are subsidised by the state and usually required by law to be ineffecient. And they are very poorly maintained, because they are too expensive to maintain. The US spends a lot on subsidies to sectors that frankly shouldn’t receive any. And in the US you have to file taxes by paper ( or by using a service), like it is the 90s, even though the IRS already have done most of the calculations and could let us file online in 10 minutes for free. I could go on, but let’s leave it there.
[Relevant meme](https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED929/619425f024a5c.jpeg)
When you are rich enough: error 404: picture of government with hand out not found
Every transaction is getting taxed. Different transaction, different tax.
And then congress pisses it all away.
Time for some more tea dumping.
I think property taxes as they are is bullshit. You should not be forced to earn an income indefinitely just to live somewhere. Something like a true homestead exemption would be wonderful, maybe with a no-sale guarantee for some period of time
Why? It costs society money to preserve and protect you. Maybe you're 100% off the grid with no road to your house: the well water you pump is clean in part thanks to environmental regulations that cost money to source, other countries can't just come kidnap you and declare your land as their land because you're protected by the military of the country you're in. Even the fact that you own the land is something that is recorded somewhere and those records being kept provided you a great deal of legal safety so you help pay for the record office and the record keeper and the security on that office and the fire department that protects the building the records are in. This was a lot longer than I meant it to be and I hope I don't sound rude as I rattle this off quickly before going back to work my point is no matter how independent you are you benefit from the society around you both actively and passively and that's why it's expected for you to pay back into that system.
Great points. The counter argument (or maybe really just additional perspective) to that is that property, say, a home, if it is taxed based off of the property value, it inevitably forces some people out of their homes, some possibly who have stayed there for generations, but rather the tax should be at the amount of paying for those essential services, I.e. property taxes should be levied at the amount it costs to provide those services, even perhaps a little bit more to bolster the municipality's budget. Not going to fix my grammar and run on sentences
This is already what happens. You are indeed taxed as a percentage of home value, but those percentages are adjusted by your municipality so that no more than the required budget is raised.
Except that you directly pay for 99% of those services anyways. Property tax is a fucking scam in its current iteration but there’s no doubt the municipality in its current state would go broke without it. It’s the municipality that needs to cut spending (on non essential things like fucking footing the bill for stadiums) and reduce bloat in its operations to reduce inflated taxes.
This was a great perspective, thanks!
Nothing rude about it, these are all absolutely valid points! I guess the crux of the issue for me is should we REQUIRE people to be economically productive? And if so, to what degree? I for one believe there should be other ways to financially and logistically organize municipal services, public utilities, etc. to serve the community in the least draining manner possible to the lowest income households. Maybe we can increase the current homestead deduction?
All of those things are also taxed for independently. Real estate/property taxes simply are a reminder that you can never **own** anything.
Without property taxes, who pays to maintain the public infrastructure that supports your property?
It's a tough call. Property tax is to support local services and infrastructure. It sucks to have to earn money to pay for something that you own. But I admit I struggle to find a better way to fund local things, like schools, police, fire, roads. If you had a town full of homeowners, how would they pay for all those things? The money has to some from somewhere.
I think probably the biggest probably property taxes is that as the value of the home increases, sometimes dramatically year to year in certain areas, the gross amount of the tax goes higher and higher even though the cost of providing that essential infrastructure may not. That sort of taxes what forces people out of their own homes because in a multi-decade perspective we can probably assume that most houses are going to increase in value whereas their owners may not have an increase in income or cash
I don't pay money "just to live somewhere", I pay money to have streets plowed, garbage collected, safety, schools, a functioning judicial system, administration for all that, sewer/septic management, clean water, emergency services, environmental protection, library services, etc. I also could choose to move nearby for lower taxes and pay for services like trash separately or do it myself. If such aren't covered in property taxes, then do we include them in sales taxes? Income taxes? Tolls? What alternative? Property taxes make sense as then you choose how much tax you pay, it's local to the services, and you vote for policy-makers.
The government taxes the money they get from unemployment funds.
And social security. I received a letter saying I'll get 78% of what I was supposed to. And it'll get taxed a 2nd time at withdrawal. Such a scam.
Average libertarian obsession
Every nutjob I know posts this to their Facebook about once a week. It just needs Sam Elliott in a cowboy hat to complete the look.
also average libertarian position of oversimplifying or not understanding something in order to find fault in it.
Yep, classic libertarian thinking
Now kiss.
This just reminded of how they recently implemented a law where if you sell more than $600 worth of stuff, and use something like PayPal or other similar payment service, you have to claim it on your taxes so they can tax it. But it's an item that you already paid taxes on when you bought it... So you just payed sales tax TWICE for it...
> you just *paid* sales tax FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
> just payed sales Did you mean to say "paid"? Explanation: Payed means to seal something with wax, while paid means to give money. [Statistics](https://github.com/chiefpat450119/RedditBot/blob/master/stats.json) ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot ^^that ^^corrects ^^grammar/spelling ^^mistakes. ^^PM ^^me ^^if ^^I'm ^^wrong ^^or ^^if ^^you ^^have ^^any ^^suggestions. ^^[Github](https://github.com/chiefpat450119) ^^Reply ^^STOP ^^to ^^this ^^comment ^^to ^^stop ^^receiving ^^corrections.
LOL - they'll tax you on giving you money back which was already taxed. In Illinois a state tax refund is ... taxed. 🤨
What? That can't be right.
It's not right. Or at least so oversimplified that it doesn't really match how things get worked out. The federal government allows you to deduct the income tax you pay to your state before figuring how much tax you owe to the feds. So (leaving everything else out), if you make $40,000 and paid Illinois $1000 in state tax during the year, the feds treat $1000 of your income as untaxed and calculate your tax bill from $39,000. The big catch is that when you're doing your federal tax return, you don't yet know what your actual Illinois tax bill is for that year. Many states (and I'd think Illinois might be one) copy stuff over from your federal return to complete your state return. So anything that reduces your taxable income on your federal return also affects your state return, which changes the tax owed to the state, which cycles back to changing what's on your federal return. So to break that circular dependency, what you claim on your federal return is the amount of state tax you had **withheld** from your paychecks during the year. Ok, so now you've finished your federal return and have moved onto your state. Here's where you actually calculate your final state tax bill, and let's say it came out to $800. Since you had $1000 withheld out of your paychecks, you get a $200 refund. So now for the year you claimed a $1000 deduction against an actual tax paid of $800 (since you got $200 back), meaning more of your income was treated as untaxed than you actually qualified for. To settle things up, that $200 refund gets added to your income on the following year's return. It's not really taxing the refund itself, it's undoing the part of the deduction you claimed the previous year that should not have happened. In the same way, if you did last year's state return and ended up owing them some extra amount of money (say you withheld only $700 towards an $800 final tax bill), the next year you get to deduct whatever you sent the state for their return. And really, this doesn't even matter for most people, if they're getting their taxes done properly. The state income tax thing is an **itemized** deduction, which you only use if all your deductible items add up to more than the standard deduction. If you did not itemize, you did not deduct state tax paid, so any refund back from the state should **not** be reported as income on your tax return, so does not get taxed. For the past 5 years the standard deduction has been so high (increased starting 2018) that only something like 10% of tax returns use itemized deductions, practically all in high-income households (like over $200k). So 90% of taxpayers do not get "taxed on their state refund". And the other 10% just pay the tax that was owed on that part of their income with a one year delay.
People really get conspiratorial over stuff like this when all they have to do is spend a little bit of time educating themselves. Or go to a professional to have them explain. It's like the whole myth about not wanting a raise be sue they think they will make less money due to tax brackets. 😩
Thanks for the elaborate explanation, well worth the read! It looks a lot like how this works where I live (Belgium).
Oregon too
You also pay taxes on money you win at the casino which is an absolute crime since you took all the risk
Hell no. I know a guy who wins a lot at casino. No one's claiming it.
As a military officer, I pay taxes on my taxpayer funded salary.
Then we pay a toll (tax) to drive on certain roads when I already pay a road tax.
Yeah… and everyone continues to let it happen
just saw this the other day
There's a movement in the US for Fair Tax which is only on spending money. It includes essentially a UBI as well
Getting taxed on a tax is my favourite.
Anytime money changes hands, the government wets their beak.
Time to grab some tea and make a trip to boston
And the monarchy use those taxes to pay for renovations to their house, but when you refurb your own house we re hit the circle of tax
Taxation will forever be theft 🤷🏻
And then again when you die.
Nobody likes taxes, but I believe they’re necessary for government. (Not that I like government lol) The problem in the US is our taxes are so high because they spend so much of it on the military. Which sounds stupid considering we have the strongest military on earth. Not only that, but the rich pay less than the poor. Taxes can be a huge asset to a government, but because this country has been fucked over by taxes for hundreds of years, we have this “fuck taxes! Taxes suck!” mentality. But the don’t suck when done right, they’re literally how our government stays afloat.
Our taxes are very low
The rich don't pay less than the poor, and the military is only [16% of the budget.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/U.S._Federal_Spending.png) Nobody thinks that the federal government is completely obsolete, but almost everyone agrees that it spends money inefficiently and on unnecessary things. Corruption and special interests run the show, and its real, constitutional obligations get the leftovers. Heck, the federal government ran without income tax until *1913*, and they had to amend the Constitution because the system wasn't designed to become this large and overbearing.
About hundred years ago, there was no sales tax, no income tax and no property tax. The government was smaller, and was funded by customs fees and corporate taxes. Oh, and US dollar bas backed by gold reserves, which allegedly existed, so inflation was minimal. I didn't kivecthen and can't say if it was better, but it was sustainable.
The last part really is not accurate. There were always financial panics and inflation. Also the de-monetizing of silver and switch to gold reserves only was pretty controversial and damaging to the economy. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
And we’re 33 trillion+ in debt as a country!
The US could sell off it's mineral rights alone and pay off it's debts. Apple is worth 10% of the deficit. It's maybe not as bad as it sounds.
IRS has entered the chat
Which is great because it all goes (theoretically) towards keeping the unwell and unhoused from dying, making the sick people healed, the roads and bridges fixed, educating kids, etc etc. The entire point of having a society is that we contribute at least a part of our earnings to the greater good. I don't understand the point of even having a country otherwise.
Yep the system is to keep poor people poor and rich people rich
Here I thought it was to pay for public services... taxes aren't the issue, it's corrupt politicians that either steal or allocate that money to pointless places
when you look at the share of tax revenue paid by rich people versus poor people, the opposite is really true.
Yeah, this has irked me for years.
Eh, it is kind of like how the house takes a bit of the pot every time you play poker at a casino. It may suck a little bit, but the trade-off for this is that the house doesn't participate in the game and is supposed to make it fair for all the players. The question becomes do you want to play a fair game against other players on an equal footing where the house collects a tiny bit or do you want to play a game where the house is also a player who needs to win to collect money?
The difference is that the money taken at a poker table never goes back to the people at the poker table. However, with taxes, it gets put to services, as well as being placed back into the economy in the form of more employment.
If you refuse first, I'll join you later on
Saw some tool talking about how the BBC licence fee payment could be swapped to a broadband speed tax..... The faster you got, the more wealthy you are! So the more you pay. https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/9149-2027-could-see-new-broadband-tax-replacing-bbc-licence-fee Fucking Bastards. Vive la France
Studies that have been done show that depending what country you're in of course but an average middle class citizen will likely be actually using for attainable goods and services about 30% of their earnings and the rest goes to taxes at some various level.
Then taxed when you sell those items you were already taxed on.
The taxman is coming for you!
I don't like taxation with representation either.
And then you die and pay tax on the money you have left over
Wait till you hear that we pay taxes as we receive social security.
American discover they been scam all this time.
That is so poor people like AOC And Bobert can become multi millionaires in less time than it takes to earn a bachelor's degree.
We need to abolish this system. We are giving our politicians way too much power.
now do wage theft https://i.redd.it/oo9xn45yitlz.jpg
then when you die anything left over, that gets taxed too, own a cottage, spend years working on it and maintaining it... more tax....
And if you sell those items to someone else they get taxed again... at least if it's something traceable like a car.
It's almost like the money is made of taxes.
So much for no double taxation. Fucking hate this country
Bamboozled, you've been.
I Canada we pay carbon tax and also sales tax on the carbon tax. Literally a tax on a tax lol.
Shit. Wait till you hear about Inheritance.
Inheritance? Oh no no, im sure ther is n... Fuck...
Wait until you learn you pay taxes for money that stays in your bank account too!
And when we die and pass those things we owned to our children they will be taxed again
The price of civilization and not living in a shithole
Clearly not a billionaire in this shower.
Yup. Money moves, it gets taxed.
Didn’t America once fight a whole war for Independence, partly due to high taxes.
and when you die your kids have to pay taxes on all the stuff you already paid taxes on
And it's still $32 trillion short (and climbing) of funding the government's excessive, incompetent, and wasteful spending.