that would be the Queen of Spain if I remember correctly. Did she build the roads and infrastructure? A flag was planted. some Forts were built.
If you look at the history of roads in this country they were originally private enterprises. Now you can make the case that land was granted by deed’s given by government agencies. But any roads built by the Government later on were financed by the taxes generated from Wealth, not the other way around.
There are examples of government laying the groundwork for transportation nodes like the Erie Canal. But that was financed with stock sales which again come from wealth.
The entire postcolumbian colonization was an extension of European infrastructure into the Americas. Columbus and all of his men were born and raised within the social and physical infrastructure of the subcontinent and brought it with them. Without government there was no financing, no ships, no preserved stores, no charts or navigational instruments. Hunter/gatherer societies simply do not produce those things. Perhaps wealth does come first in the sense that as societies grow and become more complex than that they begin to develop governments. You could say it is wealth that is sparking that population growth and social advance. But that seems to have little bearing upon Columbus. He was thousands of years removed from when his ancestors may have experienced wealth before government.
It wasn’t wealth when it was just the government and government-funded universities. When private companies started connecting to the Internet, the Free Enterprise Fairy came along and sprinkled Wealth Dust over it and then it became wealth.
Did taxes from pre-existing wealth built the roads, or was it private enterprise?
You do realize taht you can borrow money to pay for roadsd and then pay it back later right? Its sorta like what people are proposing now.
Lets take the interstate highway system. It undoubetedly facilitates a LOT of comerce and is instrumental in the creation of a LOT of wealth. So regardless of where the tax revenue came from, it was still built by government.
Well, historically roads were not so much “built” as they happened to exist because people took the same route over and over again and flattened the ground over time.
Then the Romans came along and had the bright idea to pave them over for faster and more reliable military transportation. What utter tax-and-spend pillocks, those guys. Totally not hip to the invisible hand of the free market. No wonder their little empirette only lasted a thousand years.
Actually the disagreement is about whether the money should be paid as taxes or not after he dies. What Gates can do with his money while he’s alive can’t possibly be relevant.
It has nothing to do with the estate tax, but he is correct - youridea that any person, foundation, or corporation would invest their hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in primarily treasury bonds is insane. Even extremely conservative pension funds don’t invest primarily in treasury bonds.
Your parents are both :
A. Worth more than $5million
B. Not smart enough to hire a estate attorney
?!?:eek::dubious:
And dudes- the money is not “double taxed”. Rich dudes are not like Scrooge McDuck, the money is not kept in coins & bills in a “money vault”. It is invested, generally in Capital assets. At the time of death, the estate pays the taxes on the up-til-now UNTAXED Capital gains.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be snarky. Let me explain.
A pension fund or insurance company must achieve some rate of return to compete so they buy corporate bonds, preferred stock and maybe even invest in a hedge fund or two.
The heir to a massive fortune isn’t trying to maximize their rate of return so much as they are trying to preserve capital. If you have more money than you, your children and your grandchildren can spend in their lifetimes (assuming a reasonable upper class lifestyle, no cocaine parties with live music by Elton John), your job isn’t to become wealthy, your job is to stay wealthy. And, when you have that much money, (Bill Gates is worth something like $66 billion), there just aren’t enough places to safely put that kind of money.
Of course they do something to keep themselves busy and a lot of them start their own business because they can afford to take some venture risk and they start companies with very good capitalization and good advice but they don’t put billions of dollars into their new frozen yogurt chain.
Some fun numbers to indicate just how much $66Bn is. If Bill and Melinda wanted the security of having FDIC insured accounts and each put the maximum $250,000 in an account in every bank and credit union in the United States, they would only have protected just a little over 10% of their wealth.
So if the Federal Government were to borrow a couple of trillion dollars we would see more money returned in taxes? And if they doubled down the returns would increase?
That’s easy: the Banking Industry. Look at it this way, the Fed (which exist under the powers granted to Congress from the Constitution) loans tax money collected from the IRS to banks at .25% interest for them to dole out mortgages at 4% interest to the public - that’s well over 1000% increase in the interest rate. If you think about it, it’s quite an elegant way to generate wealth: take the taxes from people’s paychecks, loan it to the banks at a heavy discount, then allow banks to charge the people whatever they want to charge as a market rate. What the government ought to do is allow everyone to open an account to the Federal Reserve so that each and every American can enjoy low interest rates without private banks muddying the waters with inflated interest rates. Keep in mind, it’s precisely this muddying the waters in regards to public money that cost the private banking industry the ability to administer student loans.
As for the OP, there should be no reason why the loopholes can’t be closed either legislatively or at the departmental level. As for the latter, a possible solution would be to exponentially increase the IRS workforce so that individuals making over a certain amount would receive an automatic audit. The fines for failing to file or paying your taxes ranges from 0.5% to 25%; for example, if you owe $1000 and paid a month late, your late fee would be $5 - $1000 (tax bill) + $5 (late fee) = $1005: that interest penalty rate is way too low and and is not in line with the private industry, IRS late fees and interest penalties should be increased substantially to discourage tax avoidance. IMO, the IRS should be more aggressive (i.e. meaning “War on Drugs” aggressive) in pursuing tax cheats and frauds as well as confiscating and liquidating collateral.
:eek::dubious: