Are you suggesting these people had no income in these years?
In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.
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…it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.
Yes, but it is proof that a “wealth” tax is not unheard of. What is being proposed is a new tax at the federal level, but it is in line with other taxing concepts out there. This is not some absurd new way of soaking the rich; it is a way of closing an income loophole.
2% of Elon’s wealth could solve world hunger? That doesn’t even remotely pass the smell test. 2% of Elon’s wealth as of today (its highest ever), would be about $5 billion dollars.
If $5 billion could solve world hunger, we would have solved it a long, long time ago. For that matter, you could add the $5 billion ‘world hunger fix’ to the reconciliation bill, raising its cost from 3.5 trillion to… 3.55 trillion. Or you could fix world hunger by lowering the amount allocated for more IRS agents from 80 billion to 75 billion.
For reference, the U.S. government spends about $80 billion per year on food stamps. I guess they solve world hunger 16 times per year.
They don’t sell them. They get loans from the bank at puny interest rates, far lower than even capital gains and live on that. Then that take a “salary” that can pay the interest and pay taxes on that. Except of course they have exemptions that let them avoid taxe on even those tiny amounts.
Elon Musk’s real problem is that he’s an irredeemable asshole. This has been discussed on this board before, and was notably portrayed in what seemed to me a fairly even-handed biography by the journalist and fellow South African Ashlee Vance.
And then there’s this:
In a separate tweet, Musk said any government-induced reallocation of wealth would be better managed by the private sector.
WTF? More than any other country in the world, the US has been allowing the allocation of wealth to be “managed by the private sector”. That’s how we got the infamous 1% in the first place, how the US got rampant grinding poverty in the midst of obscene wealth, and how it got one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing income disparities between the super-rich and everyone else.
Meawhile, Musk is fine with taking billions in public money in the form of SpaceX contracts while paying no taxes himself, and using some of those billions to create a space tourism industry for billionaires and further enrich himself. And this, in his view, is private enterprise demonstrating how it’s “best” at capital allocation for the social good.
We have plenty of Musk supporters complaining about people who also choose to have no net income. They choose that rather than toil at some shitty minimum wage job being hassled by assholes all day. Full supply of invectives by these capitalists directed a people who are apparently lazy shiftless sponges using laws and regulations to avoid contributing to society, and none towards the mega wealthy who also use the law to avoid contributing to society.
The math is irrelevant because you can’t actually solve world hunger with money, the world hunger claim was not a good one to begin with. Much hunger is about logistical / societal stability / etc problems in countries that have poor infrastructure, conflict regions etc. There’s plenty of areas of the world with high hunger where if you just roll bags of money in, a local warlord or what have you is just going to take it and use it for bad things, and no one is going to get fed. This was something we found out very quickly in Somalia in the early 90s, that just a willingness to send money wasn’t actually improving things on the ground. So we sent a UN peacekeeping force to make sure the right people were getting help, and ended up in a shooting war, which the public and Bill Clinton very quickly said “alright time to fuck on out of here” over.
When I came to realize this is when I really came around to supporting the idea of wealth taxes. The argument that I’ve gotten from some people is that “property taxes are meant to pay for the infrastructure and services that directly benefit that property” - but it’s clear to me that isn’t how it works in practice, since properties are not taxed based on how many resources they use, but instead based on assessed market value. Certainly it seems reasonable to me to treat other forms of wealth in the same manner that we treat property for the purposes of taxation. The fact that the uber-wealthy can leverage their wealth to fund lavish lifestyles without actually claiming any income definitely highlights a flaw in the current system.
Ya, that’s why I said clearly close. I didn’t want to do the math but I knew it it would be 270-340 range. 1% for single earners is about 360k so he wouldn’t be in it but close.
Can you give an example of one of those exemptions? I’m aware of several exemptions that phase out at higher income levels but I’m not aware of any that you can’t take advantage of until you hit certain thresholds?
Operate 13 or so aircraft carriers or solve world hunger? If we are going to make fallacious analogies we ought to point out that the government is not a good steward.
I find it fascinating that nearly everybody in this thread, in their zeal to make the ultra-rich pay their “fair” share, is so studiously ignoring the fact that Musk is correct. The history of the modern income tax presents a warning, for anybody willing to see it. Like this billionaire tax proposal, the income tax started out at a very high trigger point, so only a relative handful of people were subject to it.
BUT–government is never satisfied. It always wants more and more. The article in the OP quotes Musk–
“Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you,” he wrote on Twitter.
And here we go–
There isn’t yet an estimate from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the billionair’s tax could raise $200 billion to $250 billion of revenue over a decade.
Remember that $3.5 trillion plan that the liberals are trying to ram through Congress? If the higher end of Pelosi’s estimate is correct, this tax would pay for a measly 7% of the cost of that bill! Where, pray tell, do you people think that the rest of that money is going to come from?
Just like the income tax, the trigger point for this new tax is going to get lower, and lower, and lower.
I mean that wasn’t actually the point of Musk’s that I took issue with, it was more his assertion that he basically shouldn’t have to pay taxes because he knows how to better spend the money than the government.
But his warning kind of falls flat, the sort of activity being taxed here simply isn’t done by most Americans. Something like 70% of the country has no investment earnings at all. That’s a major difference from the income tax–which no one thought only rich people had income in the early 1900s.
Also I frankly wouldn’t mind if the trigger point was very low. Most genuinely lower income people won’t be affected by the tax regardless of at what level it is assessed. I do think you could structure it more intelligently though, for example maybe have a deduction so that you can say until your taxes owed under the calculation would exceed the amount you paid in Federal income taxes that year, you owe no tax. That way it would only affect people who get a disproportionate share of their income from investing, which would phase out most people below the $500k/yr mark.
