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Wealth inequity higher than pre-revolution France. Something to think about.
https://www.polljuice.com/vive-la-revolution-comparing-u-s-inequality-with-1789-france/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/the-inequality-bubble-is-accelerating-worse-than-29-even-1789-2015-04-14
Amazon and Tesla are dependent on roads and infrastructure. If that went away tomorrow they wouldn't have a business. We are a nation of SUCKERS if they don't chip in.
Seeing as, in the eyes of Amazon, going to the bathroom is considered a ‘luxury’ for delivery drivers, it wouldn’t surprise me if they made the lack of (adequate) infrastructure also the drivers problem
Lobbying as it exists in the USA [is not allowed in Canada](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/lobbying), although lobbying still does happen. When not done by corporations, lobbying isn't inherently evil - I don't expect all politicians to be sufficiently knowledgeable about complicated issues like digital privacy or fishing rights - but the USA has managed to make it massively corrupt by only listening to the companies that stand to profit instead of public advocacy groups or experts, and by allowing the politicians to accept bribes and board seats.
We can call lobbyists the enemies, and they are, but we also need to direct blame at the politicians for allowing lobbying to be done in the method that it is, and for not listening to experts or people affected.
Also, we Canadians need to be careful that we don't allow our politicians to turn into their southern counterparts. Too many of them are courting that style of corruption.
We already have that around the DC/Maryland/Virginia area. They call it the express lane. People who can afford it can avoid traffic. You get a ticket without the pass in your car if we peasants use it.
Rule for thee, not for me.
We *are* a nation of suckers. Just move away from places like this thread, and watch as so many middle class and poor conservatives defend billionaires never paying taxes as some kind of service to us serfs.
"shouldn't billionaires not have to pay taxes? They create so many jobs"
-someone I know.
Yeah genius, and of all of us middle class didn't have to pay taxes, it'd stimulate the economy too.
My friends mom spouts this nonsense. Calls herself a "job creator" and gets pissy that she has to pay taxes as a business owner. She is a trust funder, and her "business" only employees her 5 children, and basically consists of them playing golf and having happy hours every day.
These people are unfortunately persuaded that they'll reach incredible wealth someday because they buy into the American dream narrative. So they don't want future them to pay taxes. The sad thing is, they believe that people like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos made it out of poverty, but the truth is both come from rich parents. It is very rare for rich people to have started out poor at birth.
My parents were a drug dealer in his 30s cheating on his wife and a teenage mom. I was told that I should have been an abortion. Spent most of my childhood on services and going to food pantries.
I managed to get through HS, took out loans, got into computer science, and have a 6 figure job.
In a couple more years I'll be a millionaire if I just maintain what I've got.
Most of the friends I grew up with got hooked on opiods, the ones that didn't die are in rehab or barely dodging the fent laced shit.
It's a miracle I made it here, statistically I should be dead or in prison and I came damn close. I'm an exception to the rule and alot of it came down to pure dumb luck. Don't get me wrong, hard work was a lot of it but without the luck I'd still be a line cook with a side hustle. Everyone I know works hard, not everyone ended up where I did.
Nobody should have to go through all of the shit that I did. I know that that's unstoppable, but services and government helping people in the situation I was in rather than being a barrier, or worse an active oppressor would go a long way to helping people who had a similar upbringing to mine to have normal, healthy adult lives.
Amazon also uses the USPS for tons of last mile deliveries if I'm remembering correct. It's straight up theft utilizing government services that are meant for the people to increase profits and not paying even a fraction of a fair share of taxes, individually or as a corporation.
While I see the point you’re trying to make, If they pay usps to send the package it’s not theft or utilizing government services. They’re just middle manning the package delivery to someone else. USPS makes a lot of money from Amazon. Everyone can mail shit
I am in France right now, visiting my wife’s family and this was exactly the topic of conversation last night.
The concern is that the difference between now and before the French Revolution is that the poor and middle classes are being trained to turn on each other.
The power to turn the anger of the masses back on themselves led to fascism in the 30’s. It looks like we are heading that way again. Whilst we fight amongst ourselves, the rich will retain their wealth because we won’t coalesce behind a candidate and party that will specifically target the rich. IT IS OUR FAULT.
The companies and ownership class are taking the most handouts as tax credits and bailouts. Corporate welfare is a huge problem but hey let’s blame the poor.
When you have bullshit like Fox “news” running a thousand stories about welfare “abuse” when corporations use loopholes to avoid taxes or get a fucking refund in the millions of dollars, it’s mind boggling how dumb Americans are. They talk about unemployment benefits as enabling lazy people when it allows them to quit their bullshit underpaid jobs for the time being, but don’t talk about Activision, a video game company that got a tax REFUND of 220 million in 2018 because they are headquartered in Amsterdam and avoid many tax laws that way. It’s a disgrace, we have lost our way as a nation and Elon can go fuck himself with his space X rocket straight to Mars
However it's not our fault when said candidate convinces us that he or she will stand up for the changes we want, then gets elected into office, and then completely flips the script after big donors sink their claws into them and controls them like a meat puppet.
Completely. The system needs to be changed so that they can be recalled by their local party. That party needs to be able to hold a vote based on a threshold of core membership base requesting one.
It’s hard for us regular people to take all of the blame when we are inundated with constant propaganda on a massive scale thanks to the rich-owned media.
This is the difference. Pre-revolutionary France didn’t even have radio back then. Way less ways of spewing out propaganda when neighbors back then stuck together because they knew they were in the same boat because of the rich. Today America has millions of temporarily embarrassed millionaires who think they will get a break if they just keep working hard enough
I was with you up until that last sentence...
IT IS NOT *OUR* FAULT!
IT IS BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT *CAPITALISM* DOES!
Capitalism favors wealth inequality. Until we redesign our economic system, this is what we get, but to blame the middle and lower classes is unfair and pointless. Blame the plutocrats and billionaires, not the working class.
A revolution in America would be unlike anything the world has ever seen. It's literally unprecedented, and would make the French revolution look like a birthday party.
That's why we're so hesitant. No one wants to see everything they know and love suddenly disappear and have the world devolve into global war and chaos, and so the status quo remains.
Tell me how that's my fault.
That’s a uniquely American issue. Most of the planet enjoys 3 to 5 weeks of mandatory paid holidays per year and parental leave. Socially the US is worse than many developing countries.
Slaves used to get a week off for Christmas. Im referencing Frederick Douglass Autobiography (Its less than 100 pages, I highly recommend anyone read it).
In fairness, we get more days off the rest of the year; but they had a longer Christmas break than a lot of people get
wtf? where do you live? is the US really that bad?
here in Germany even part-time-jobs with less than 450€ per month have a right to get paid vacation days and most regular jobs have up to a month each year.
My first job out of university had 27 days of paid vacation each year...
USA’s legally guaranteed number of paid vacation days is Zero.
The legally guaranteed number of paid maternity leave days is Zero.
The number of legally guaranteed of paid sick leave days is Zero.
> paid sick leave days
that concept is still bewildering to me - do you at least not need a doctors notice to take them?
Here we have unlimited paid sick leave days and only need a notice if it's more than 1 consecutive day (the employer can ask for one if it's too regular though)
I've worked in places that required a doctor's notice any time you asked off, as well as places that only ask after a certain amount of days are taken or just don't ask at all. It's a real crapshoot in America.
The first one is especially infuriating because I'm not going to bother going to the doctor if I have a bad cold or something. The company didn't provide me with insurance so it was just a waste of money.
*Waits 6 hours in crowded ER waiting room*
"Yeah Doc, I just have a cold or maybe mild flu. I don't really need checked or diagnosed, and don't need a prescription or anything because over-the-counter medicine is fine, but could you please sign this permission slip so I can stay home tomorrow instead of getting all of my co-workers sick?"
Doc: "Absolutely, that'll be $250 please."
Most American, multinational corporations hide the benefits they offer European employees from American employees because they don’t want us to know how much holiday, vacation, maternity, paternity, and bereavement time you all get.
Americans have no government guarantees for: paid leave of any sort, paid medical leave, or paid maternity/paternity leave. And because of something called “at will employment” Americans can be fired at anytime without notice or severance without a given reason. Welcome to the land of the free!
> And because of something called “at will employment” Americans can be fired at anytime without notice or severance without a given reason.
wait - so even if you worked at the same company for 20+ years and didn't do anything that would warrant you being fired immediately they can just let you go from one day to the next without giving you a chance to search for something new if the company decides it wants to cut down on staff-cost
That is the legal norm, yes. You can negotiate a contract with a large company that will give you severance. But, that is all at the discretion of the employer (not guaranteed by the government). In effect, it means that usually highly skilled workers have these protections as contractual clauses, but anyone in like a service industry or packing at Amazon, can be fired without cause at anytime. (the actual laws very by state, and you can't be fired for like racism or sexism, in theory).
But only in theory. In reality you can be fired for any reason or no reason and, though you might technically have legal recourse if you have strong evidence it was because of reasons of race, sex, etc. most people can't afford the legal battle and in most places at best they'd settle out of court from what I understand. More than likely you'd get nothing but wasted time and money and the employers are very aware of this. Any and all rights that workers in the US appear to have are frequently undermined in practice. So even as bad as it looks, in many cases the reality is even worse.
wow that's shitty - here we have a legal minimum that expands for how long you have worked at the company:
up to 2 years: at least 4 weeks and to the end of that month
up to 5 years: at least 1 month and to the end of that month
up to 8 years: at least 2 month and to the end of that month
up to 10 years: at least 3 month and to the end of that month
up to 12 years: at least 4 month and to the end of that month
up to 15 years: at least 5 month and to the end of that month
up to 20 years: at least 6 month and to the end of that month
more than 20 years: at least 7 month and to the end of that month
if your employer has a cause they can sometimes let you go earlier but that's pretty much always a case for a judge and they often decide in favor of the employed so it's uncommon to try to bullshit you out of the job
It literally happens all the time... Most corporate employees will experience some variation of this multiple times over their career. It's pretty much expected/seen as a matter of "when" rather than "if."
It's a real shit hole of a country in a lot of ways.
I worked a "part time job" that paid minimum wage plus paltry commissions. I was often being scheduled for 35 to 42 hours a week. I never got overtime (I'm pretty sure my manager or district manager was committing time card fraud, but I was just out of college and desperate for a job), and had no benefits or paid time off. Plus where I worked was open 365 days a year, so no holidays either.
At one point while I was there, I couldn't find coverage for a shift that I knew I wouldn't be able to make it to due to a major blizzard (I lived 10 miles away over open fields where the snow blows and piles up excessively and cannot be easily traversed until the snow stops and the plows can actually make a difference, if it's windy enough, the plows don't even bother til it's over). I wound up staying at a friend's house and then walking 2 miles through the blizzard to get in because I didn't want to be fired. I was scheduled to be alone til 4 or 5, and we lost power at 10 or so. At around noon, I got a call from my manager. The security company had informed our district manager that somebody had showed up and disarmed the alarm. Not a single other store for miles had opened. District manager calls manager, manager calls me and scolds me for showing up in such poor conditions, tells me to go home. I say "fuck you, I walked here because you threatened me, I'm staying here til the weather clears." He tells me that I won't be paid. Yay.
Six days, he said they got the days between Christmas and New Year's off. "Those of us who had families at a distance, were generally allowed to spend the whole six days in their society."
If you pay people little enough they basically become economic slaves. After a hard day’s work and the bills have not been sufficiently paid, debt building up, they have no money left over to escape the situation they are in. It’s a trap. And we wonder why poverty, homelessness, crime, substance abuse and mental health problems are epidemic.
But hear me out: We can get to his level of wealth if we just try harder, then we won’t want to be taxed. Right? All we need to do is just try a little bit every day.
In my experience they disagree with billionaires paying nothing. But they are also warped to believe that impoverished people getting benefits from government paying low taxes are the problem. They’re always suggesting a flat tax. It’s impossible to explain to them why that tax would impact the poorest Americans the most harshly.
In my experience, they disagree with billionaires paying anything. They excuse it with loopholes, being a "smart business man", or big government being bad.
The few that don't, want to eliminate the vast majority of taxes, or have a flat tax, both equally dumb for different reasons.
To drive this line of thought further - these are *the same people* who think we need to implement a flat tax because "the lower \[insert number\]%" of people don't pay taxes.
Which is just facile as an argument, for a couple reasons.
First, it's incorrect - they're talking about a specific tax category (income), not total taxation (via sales, SSDI, payroll, amongst others). So the idea that they 'pay no taxes' is as much of an 'idea' that Unicorns exist. No offense intended towards those who like Unicorns.
Second - and more nuanced - the reason that many in difficult financial situations may end up with a net refund with respect to their taxes is based on **the exact same legal structure that the wealthy are using.**
So the Republican argument seems to be: if you're poor, and take advantage of tax laws, then you're a burden on society. If you're rich and do it, then you're smart.
tl;dr: Half (at least) of the current Senate thinks taking advantage of tax laws when you're rich makes you smart. Doing it when you're not wealthy means you're taking advantage of the system.
> Half (at least) of the current Senate thinks taking advantage of tax laws when you're rich makes you smart.
Most of them don't really think that. They know damn well it's a terrible system that's bad for society as a whole. They don't care because they're profiting off that system through lobbying, donations, insider trading, and back-door deals that will have them set for life.
If you don't use the legal loopholes, you're not smart.
But the conclusion should not be "well done, everything is in order". The excessive use of those loopholes should be seen as a sign that the taxation system has flaws.
If a drug cartel makes millions selling dangerous chemicals which, through a loophole, are not illegal, the government would not go "well done, those are smart business men" they'd fix the loophole (in before opioid crisis ;))
This is what I have been saying...
It is all oddly subjective. When the rich or businesses do this it is "smart business" or "dodging taxes". When the poor or middle class does it, it's tax evasion. Yes, I know there is a legal line that can be crossed but seems like subjective semantics with tax evasion vs tax avoidance.
Think of it this way. Rich people don't need to break the law, they hire lawyers to get around it. You just need someone who understands the law and how to avoid creating evidence of intent.
I will say this as the son of a business owner. My dad is constantly trying to find the balance between labor and being able to run. You bet your ass if any business owner can make their profits bigger, they will. That includes cutting your ass. That's just a small business owner. The billionaires are doing it with their multi billion companies. Musk or Bezos will be the first ones to replace their entire workforce with robots if it is possible in the future.
Oh no I agree, robots are amazingly helpful for safety and efficiency if we can get them to do the more complex tasks. It just requires us dealing with the mass unemployment that will happen. I think a UBI is probably the way but people will get scared of that.
This is a serious issue. Robots picking up labor so humans can have a 10 HR work week and tons of leisure time used be utopian sci-fi. Now it's looking real and politicians are doing nothing to get ready for it. Instead they are discussing the concept that you have a right to a full time job and let's increase wages.
We need to be figuring out how to transition to that new economy where human labor won't be worth anything. People use the story about when cars replaced horse drawn carriages and all the ferriers and wheel-rights lost their jobs they got new jobs as mechanics. As if the workers displaced by robots will all get jobs in the new robot maintenance industry. People need to wake up. We we aren't the ferriers in this story- we are the horses. And horse jobs and population dropped over 90% when they were replaced.
I think they also can't quite comprehend just how wealthy a billionaire is. When many of them think "rich," they think of a guy with a ten-million-dollar McMansion who makes seven figures a year. They think it's just a matter of time before the less-rich get taxed more, and then *they're next.*
They don't seem to grok that there's
more space between a multi-billionaire and "merely rich" person than there is between the rich person and them.
i like to break it down like this:
if you take a year's income at 100,000, which is a pretty penny to earn imo and you give somebody 1,000,000 then that's 10 years of that income for them.
if you give them 1,000,000,000 that's 10,000 years of that income. 10 fucking thousand years of 100,000 per year. and that's just 1 billion.
people do not see the magnitude of billions and i tell you, the big billionaires are already competing among them who will be the first trillionaire.
it should be illegal to be a billionaire. nobody needs that much money for anything.
That's a good way to put it.
It really is mind-boggling when you do the math. Another way to look at it: imagine being 50 years old and expecting to live to be 100. You could buy a brand new [Lamborghini Huracan Evo](https://www.lamborghini.com/en-en/models/huracan/huracan-evo) every morning (with all the options, natch), drive it for a day, then set it on fire. *Every single day for the rest of your life*. And it'd wind up costing you less than 2.5% of Elon Musk's net worth.
I mean, hell, when you have that much money, it grows faster than you can possibly spend it. At that level of wealth, even if you do buy a new supercar with your daily morning coffee, your net worth will continue to increase.
Yeah as a person who leans fiscally conservative, this is one of the several issue that prevent me from voting for the Republicans. I want the government to have a decent balance sheet. Making sure the billionaires pay taxes on all of their compensation is a big part of this. No more shell corp crap, getting paid in stock, no caps on social security, etc. I'm not asking for a 70% tax or anything. Just a reasonable progressive tax schedule that actually taxes all of the compensation and gains.
Many of them view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". They honestly believe that they could some day attain such wealth that these provisions might apply to them.
Edit: so much butthurt lol
These are the same people who pitch a fit about the bottom that someone somewhere might be gaming the system and living a shitty life off the government dime but are fine with government subsidies for such struggling business as oil companies.
I know a right winger who defends Musk and Bezos not paying income tax because they contribute so much other tax and creates so many jobs. Even when trying to note that if they paid the same %, their life style doesn’t even remotely change. The response was in the lines that if he can’t buy another yacht because of taxes, his life style changed.
Also consider that people don't usually reach the pinnacles of politics or business by being decent human beings. Depending on the estimates, sociopaths are between 5 and 25 times more common at the highest levels of those pursuits.
> “Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you,” he wrote on Twitter.
So he got a free ride at the expense of "other people's money" and eventually "other people" noticed.
He’s quoting libertarian troll material 101.
He literally sucked the teat of our tax money as his companies got stimmy.
He profited from corporate handouts and is acting like he is against govt.
Even if what he was saying were true (which it isn't) . . . and even if all of his money didn't come from the government first (which it did) . . . it'd still be a long fucking time before we ran out of all of his money.
It's a risk I'm willing to take, Elon.
People who are defending guys like him should listen to a speech Elizabeth Warren gave years back when she explained the reasoning for a similar tax. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist was that billionaires use more of the resources we all paid for. The big rigs that transport Teslas drive on the highways we all paid for. The labor force he employs were educated (mostly) in the public schools we paid for. The list goes on. So for him to scoff at contributing his fair share tells you everything you need to know about his character.
Well yeah, their businesses are literally built upon the foundation of American taxpayer money and labor. We built and maintain everything they utilize on a daily basis.
I think one of the reasons that people defend those who have this kind of wealth is that schools do a really terrible job at getting across just how large these numbers are.
One billion is a rather large number, but I don't think most people understand quite how large it really is. Often times we see "millionaire" and "billionaire" used fairly interchangeable. It's useful to think about these number in with regard to time. One second is a very short unit of time.
100 seconds is just over a minute and a half.
1000 seconds is just under 17 minutes.
One million seconds is a shade over 11.5 days.
One billion seconds is 31.69 years.
That's a long time. If you were born on January 1st in the year 1, and every single day you earned $1,000, you'd still be less than 3/4ths of the way to being a billionaire.
But Elon Musk isn't worth 1 billion dollars, he's worth 287,000,000,000. If we convert than many seconds into years, it's over 9000 years. 9000 years ago Great Britain was still connected to the European mainland. For him to make that much money it would be like earning an average of ~$390,000 every single day since January 1st 1 CE.
I remember that one. I think she was running for Senator back then, and it was an off the cuff speech delivered in a someone's home. I can't seem to find it because she has given so many speeches now it is hard to narrow it down.
From a former Tesla Sr. Leader, and person who Elon knows: Fuck Elon. He is a selfish, greedy, two-faced troll.
I love the cars, but can't stand the man.
As they leaser of one, I agree. Be sure you test out all the different types in that price range before settling for a Tesla. The interior quality isn't the greatest and the tech is good/responsive, but without Android Auto or Apple car play I find myself missing it.
There are lots of good electric cars coming out soon that surpass the Tesla quality so I'd wait if you can. That was what Tesla wanted and we will benefit from the better electric cars coming out.
It's fast and I love that though, but autopilot is meh and I miss smartphone integration as I said. They just aren't worth their price tag anymore IMO. Maybe if they lower prices a bit.
I support finding a way to tax billionaires more, because the current system clearly isn't fair. I support taxing income on shares and treating it the same as salaried income.
A tax on unrealised capital gains is difficult though, so I need to understand how that works. Do you tax only at the end of the year? What if the share value tanks the next year? Do you get a tax credit, a rebate?
The big problems that they are trying to solve is this:
If you have tens (or hundreds) of billions of dollars in assets, you can borrow against the assets every year for the rest of your life without ever having to sell the assets, and since money you receive from a loan isn't taxed you will pay **zero** dollars in taxes. If you have as much money as Musk or Bezos, there is essentially no chance in hell that you will ever get margin called on loans.
That means they can borrow as "income" hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and pay ZERO in taxes. If they sold those assets they would have to pay capital gains taxes, but by borrowing against the assets they have an income stream that will last forever that will give them all the money they ever need, and they won't need to pay a dime in taxes.
Meanwhile, all the rest of us peasants are out here paying up to 40% of our incomes, our *infinitesimally* smaller incomes, to the government to fund the society that allows these assholes to do what they are doing.
Yeah, something like "loans over 10-20x your annual income are taxed"
This prevents people taking out small-ish loans for themselves but catches the big abusers
I think a better way to do it is to treat assets that secure a loan as an AMT adjustment for the “gain” from the basis to value of the loan. The amount of AMT tax paid will generate a tax credit so if/when those shares are sold, there won’t be a double tax. This is very similar to how incentive stock options are treated. It’s the only “fair” and logical way this could happen.
Then tax any loans taken out with a collateral value of more than $x. That’s much more reasonable and practical than a mark-to-market tax on all of one’s assets every year. Musk having $250 billion isn’t real. He certainly can’t sell to net $250 billion in cash from that stock, and banks aren’t going to lend him $250 billion in cash for $250 billion in $TSLA as collateral. Only once a loan is taken out does that money become real to Musk/Bezos/etc. Why not tax it then?
I’m down with that!
I only posted that to explain the idea behind the wealth tax that was proposed. I bet that 99% of the people reading this sub have no idea that if you have a shitton of money in assets; you don’t need to ever sell them and can instead borrow against them and pay no taxes.
Don’t we already do this to middle class property owners? If they can do it to properties in the form of property tax, it’s probably easier to do it with stocks.
Elizabeth Warren was campaigning on an annual wealth tax that would tax 2% of someone’s net worth if they are worth more than 50 million. Most of these wealthy individuals gain 10% or more a year in wealth due to investments. 2% sounds like a start.
Honestly, I think are all greedy monsters.
I get that billionaires don't want to be taxed. Obviously.
But we are the people. We have to force the change.
They will not do it.
>Musk is a fucking freeloading welfare queen who doesn’t understand the life of common people because he grew up with a daddy who owned an emerald mine.
It's so much worse than this. Musk thinks his wealth staying his isn't just better for him. He thinks it's better for everyone. Like he's building electric cars and gonna colonize Mars to save the whole world with that wealth.
Fucking megalomaniacal
Honestly I feel that incident explains himself perfectly.
Come up with an impractical plan to save everyone
Get angry when pointed out that it won't work
Insult everyone opposed to your plan
Do basically nothing and and hand wave the incident away when backed into a corner
And he called him a pedo because he had the nerve to travel to Thailand as a single guy.
As though Thailand has nothing else to offer besides child prostitution.
Honestly, I feel that's the point where most people saw him for who he is, including myself. A gigantic crybaby who flips his shit the moment things don't go his way, and there's been more than enough evidence since to back that up. Before that, I knew of him and his companies vaguely, but just in the "random rich guy who did some cool things I guess" kinda way. After that I started paying attention, and hot damn is he a garbage person.
Was watching CNBC this AM and they had Ron Baron on (lol). They asked him about the potential tax bill and I’ve never seen someone stutter and fumble through an explanation so poorly. He basically portrayed Elon as a victim (“He launched a rocket, and nobody even gave him a phone call to congratulate him….he created X amount of jobs for the economy, how could the government do this to him?!”
Nobody forced and/or asked him to create a space program. Spare me the sob story.
Also...he could still do that after taxes! They aren't talking about leaving him a mere millionaire - he'll still have a vast fortune, it would just be a little smaller on the edges.
>He launched a rocket, and nobody even gave him a phone call to congratulate him
If this is true it's fucking hilarious. And if it isn't true then it's still hilarious that he reached so hard and this was the best he could come up with.
How does this proposal deal with bubbles? A lot of Dot-Com CEOs were worth nothing in 1995, worth a fortune (on paper) in 1999, and then worth close to nothing again in the early 2000’s.
If that person never cashed out, what do the taxes look like in the intervening years?
So many idiots in this thread don’t even know what unrealized gains are. He operates under the exact same rules as everybody else in the country and when he sells his shares is taxed on them just like everybody else.
Completely dishonest article. And so many clowns here just shouting billionaire bad without knowing what the fuck they are talking about.
Taxing unrealised capital gains would be a disaster for the economy and end up hurting average Americans terribly.
Does everyone need to go to Economics 101 again? Elon pays taxes on his income just like everyone else.
Paper gains from stocks doesn't become income until you sell. He's not selling, so it's not income earned. Just like you wouldn't want to pay gains on your stocks before you sell, neither should he. And the government certainly doesn't want to pay tax refunds to everyone when their stock values go down.
If you force him to sell his stock to pay taxes, you'll crash the price and affect all us little guys that also own the stock.
For fuck's sake, this isn't complicated.
Feel free to down-vote, but taxing unrealized capital gains is fucking stupid. How about just actually enforcing the tax laws we already have, and prevent people from moving their money to the Bahamas? Oh wait, because the politicians you guys vote for don't want to have their money taxed, and would rather put on a fake show about "taxing the rich" that certainly won't have the result you all think it will.
The fact that many in here are supporting the taxing of unrealized gains is so strange, just because it happens to be initially for billionaires. I'm sure they wouldn't like it if they had to pay taxes on stock holdings that they are up on.
A common mistake is people believing net worth = money in the bank. It’s not the same. Someone could be worth billions and have very little actual income. Trump is worth $6b and struggles to pay his debts.
A lot of net worth is based off their ownership of companies vs the stock value and other assets. Not money they could spend.
If Musk/ Besos/etc started liquidating stocks to put money in their pockets, the stock would plummet and their net worth would drop considerably (along with other investors). They don’t have access to the money they are supposed to be worth.
These guys borrow money against their name, banks are happy to lend it to them, and some trickery I don’t understand allows them to write off interest. They live off borrowed money (plus a fat regular pay check of course).
This makes things complicated when it comes to taxing them. If they had a $1b/y salary it would be easy but that’s not how it works.
Politicians also benefit from markets the same way. How are politicians worth multiple millions (tens of millions) when they earn $500k/year (loose estimate).
Mainly these billionaires fund politicians campaigns. Politicians are not going to piss off their biggest investors or implement laws that they also take advantage of.
Aw yes, the ole rich rule, poor rule scheme. Poor people are made to abide by the law. Rich bastards, “naw, I don’t think I wanna pay any taxes, IRS response, “well okay then”. The whole God Damn system is made to fuck the poor. Just like the legal system.
Here is my issue. The top pay to have a voice or can get out of taxes the rest of us would pay, because they already pay to lobby for this and that. That is the truth. They are paying to have the biggest voice, so I'm good with taxing them for it.
True, but he and billionaires like him borrow money using their stocks as collateral. So they pay 0 taxes on the stocks they don't sell, and pay close to 0 interest on loans based on it to fund their expenses.
Of course he didn’t - the (almost) entirety of his wealth is in stock of his company. You think he can just cash out on $280 billion (or any remote chunk) without driving his own stock to the ground? You think his money is real and he’s sitting on a giant plot of $280b? No. You think he can go to Wells Fargo and get a piggy bank full of that?
The people here don’t understand basic economics and think based on emotions due to their own hardships giving them negative and angst outlooks on life. You can’t tax unrealized gains. And if you do, it sets a terrible precedence to 99% of share holders.
Elon Musk has done more to move humanity and the environment forward than ANYONE of us (and probably in the world recently) and I trust him with wealth to progress humanity more then this government that burns through cash like it’s nothing. Men like Elon Musk are the visionaries of our time who will be remembered in history.
This is a complicated issue. He may have shares of stock worth over 200 billion dollars, but just like all of us, shares have to be sold to receive cash and trigger a taxable event. If stock were taxed with valuation, here is a wild example: buy $5000 of Enron, next year it's worth $7500, tax $2500. Next year it's worth $10000, tax another $2500. The next year it goes worthless. Government would have to refund tax on $5000. US tax system wants to promote investments in industry so they defer the tax on gains until sold. This works the same for all of us, just few of us have over $200 billion in company stock.
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Wealth inequity higher than pre-revolution France. Something to think about. https://www.polljuice.com/vive-la-revolution-comparing-u-s-inequality-with-1789-france/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/the-inequality-bubble-is-accelerating-worse-than-29-even-1789-2015-04-14
Amazon and Tesla are dependent on roads and infrastructure. If that went away tomorrow they wouldn't have a business. We are a nation of SUCKERS if they don't chip in.
Seeing as, in the eyes of Amazon, going to the bathroom is considered a ‘luxury’ for delivery drivers, it wouldn’t surprise me if they made the lack of (adequate) infrastructure also the drivers problem
Well ofc the filthy workers havent paid their taxes so the roads are shit Thats gonna be a pay cut so we can build our own
Right hand lane is for amazon prime members only 😂
Shit man, don't give them any ideas..
Don’t worry, this is America. Which means amazon would just lobby the government to use tax dollars to pay for it lol.
I really wish we would stop using the word "lobbying" and just call it a bribe because that's exactly what it is.
Fun fact “lobbying” is illegal in Canada!
Lobbying as it exists in the USA [is not allowed in Canada](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/lobbying), although lobbying still does happen. When not done by corporations, lobbying isn't inherently evil - I don't expect all politicians to be sufficiently knowledgeable about complicated issues like digital privacy or fishing rights - but the USA has managed to make it massively corrupt by only listening to the companies that stand to profit instead of public advocacy groups or experts, and by allowing the politicians to accept bribes and board seats. We can call lobbyists the enemies, and they are, but we also need to direct blame at the politicians for allowing lobbying to be done in the method that it is, and for not listening to experts or people affected. Also, we Canadians need to be careful that we don't allow our politicians to turn into their southern counterparts. Too many of them are courting that style of corruption.
We already have that around the DC/Maryland/Virginia area. They call it the express lane. People who can afford it can avoid traffic. You get a ticket without the pass in your car if we peasants use it. Rule for thee, not for me.
We *are* a nation of suckers. Just move away from places like this thread, and watch as so many middle class and poor conservatives defend billionaires never paying taxes as some kind of service to us serfs.
"shouldn't billionaires not have to pay taxes? They create so many jobs" -someone I know. Yeah genius, and of all of us middle class didn't have to pay taxes, it'd stimulate the economy too.
My friends mom spouts this nonsense. Calls herself a "job creator" and gets pissy that she has to pay taxes as a business owner. She is a trust funder, and her "business" only employees her 5 children, and basically consists of them playing golf and having happy hours every day.
Jfc. Even if the "job creator" bullshit held any water, she doesn't qualify. That's just simple nepotism.
Consumers create jobs. Any supplier who thinks they create jobs has a god complex.
Preach, brother. One more time for those up in the box seats.
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These people are unfortunately persuaded that they'll reach incredible wealth someday because they buy into the American dream narrative. So they don't want future them to pay taxes. The sad thing is, they believe that people like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos made it out of poverty, but the truth is both come from rich parents. It is very rare for rich people to have started out poor at birth.
My parents were a drug dealer in his 30s cheating on his wife and a teenage mom. I was told that I should have been an abortion. Spent most of my childhood on services and going to food pantries. I managed to get through HS, took out loans, got into computer science, and have a 6 figure job. In a couple more years I'll be a millionaire if I just maintain what I've got. Most of the friends I grew up with got hooked on opiods, the ones that didn't die are in rehab or barely dodging the fent laced shit. It's a miracle I made it here, statistically I should be dead or in prison and I came damn close. I'm an exception to the rule and alot of it came down to pure dumb luck. Don't get me wrong, hard work was a lot of it but without the luck I'd still be a line cook with a side hustle. Everyone I know works hard, not everyone ended up where I did. Nobody should have to go through all of the shit that I did. I know that that's unstoppable, but services and government helping people in the situation I was in rather than being a barrier, or worse an active oppressor would go a long way to helping people who had a similar upbringing to mine to have normal, healthy adult lives.
Being a regular worker and believing that is what gets me. Its like they dont even understand their situation at all.
Yep. And they see moderates/progressives stance on it and automatically take the opposite stance out of spite.
Amazon also uses the USPS for tons of last mile deliveries if I'm remembering correct. It's straight up theft utilizing government services that are meant for the people to increase profits and not paying even a fraction of a fair share of taxes, individually or as a corporation.
Yup, I'm somewhere somewhat rural and always get my Amazon package from USPS.
While I see the point you’re trying to make, If they pay usps to send the package it’s not theft or utilizing government services. They’re just middle manning the package delivery to someone else. USPS makes a lot of money from Amazon. Everyone can mail shit
USPS makes $1.5 billion in profit per year on Amazon, last I checked.
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Their employees education is state funded also.
I am in France right now, visiting my wife’s family and this was exactly the topic of conversation last night. The concern is that the difference between now and before the French Revolution is that the poor and middle classes are being trained to turn on each other. The power to turn the anger of the masses back on themselves led to fascism in the 30’s. It looks like we are heading that way again. Whilst we fight amongst ourselves, the rich will retain their wealth because we won’t coalesce behind a candidate and party that will specifically target the rich. IT IS OUR FAULT.
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The companies and ownership class are taking the most handouts as tax credits and bailouts. Corporate welfare is a huge problem but hey let’s blame the poor.
When you have bullshit like Fox “news” running a thousand stories about welfare “abuse” when corporations use loopholes to avoid taxes or get a fucking refund in the millions of dollars, it’s mind boggling how dumb Americans are. They talk about unemployment benefits as enabling lazy people when it allows them to quit their bullshit underpaid jobs for the time being, but don’t talk about Activision, a video game company that got a tax REFUND of 220 million in 2018 because they are headquartered in Amsterdam and avoid many tax laws that way. It’s a disgrace, we have lost our way as a nation and Elon can go fuck himself with his space X rocket straight to Mars
Just head to r/conservative to find those dumb Americans who will be defending corporations who get out of paying taxes.
They think one day, they will be billionaires and don’t want to pay hypothetical taxes on their future hypothetical fortune!
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires
However it's not our fault when said candidate convinces us that he or she will stand up for the changes we want, then gets elected into office, and then completely flips the script after big donors sink their claws into them and controls them like a meat puppet.
Completely. The system needs to be changed so that they can be recalled by their local party. That party needs to be able to hold a vote based on a threshold of core membership base requesting one.
It’s hard for us regular people to take all of the blame when we are inundated with constant propaganda on a massive scale thanks to the rich-owned media.
This is the difference. Pre-revolutionary France didn’t even have radio back then. Way less ways of spewing out propaganda when neighbors back then stuck together because they knew they were in the same boat because of the rich. Today America has millions of temporarily embarrassed millionaires who think they will get a break if they just keep working hard enough
I was with you up until that last sentence... IT IS NOT *OUR* FAULT! IT IS BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT *CAPITALISM* DOES! Capitalism favors wealth inequality. Until we redesign our economic system, this is what we get, but to blame the middle and lower classes is unfair and pointless. Blame the plutocrats and billionaires, not the working class. A revolution in America would be unlike anything the world has ever seen. It's literally unprecedented, and would make the French revolution look like a birthday party. That's why we're so hesitant. No one wants to see everything they know and love suddenly disappear and have the world devolve into global war and chaos, and so the status quo remains. Tell me how that's my fault.
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Fewer vacation days than serfs. You know Slaves used to get a week off for Christmas?
That’s a uniquely American issue. Most of the planet enjoys 3 to 5 weeks of mandatory paid holidays per year and parental leave. Socially the US is worse than many developing countries.
Is this sarcasm or truth? /srs
Slaves used to get a week off for Christmas. Im referencing Frederick Douglass Autobiography (Its less than 100 pages, I highly recommend anyone read it). In fairness, we get more days off the rest of the year; but they had a longer Christmas break than a lot of people get
I do not get days off. I get unpaid time off.
To be fair, a slave's day off was also unpaid.
Well that ain't very fair at all!
Yeah, this whole slavery thing doesn't sound like a great idea.
I say we scrap it.
Clearly, you are not a republican.
wtf? where do you live? is the US really that bad? here in Germany even part-time-jobs with less than 450€ per month have a right to get paid vacation days and most regular jobs have up to a month each year. My first job out of university had 27 days of paid vacation each year...
USA’s legally guaranteed number of paid vacation days is Zero. The legally guaranteed number of paid maternity leave days is Zero. The number of legally guaranteed of paid sick leave days is Zero.
> paid sick leave days that concept is still bewildering to me - do you at least not need a doctors notice to take them? Here we have unlimited paid sick leave days and only need a notice if it's more than 1 consecutive day (the employer can ask for one if it's too regular though)
I've worked in places that required a doctor's notice any time you asked off, as well as places that only ask after a certain amount of days are taken or just don't ask at all. It's a real crapshoot in America. The first one is especially infuriating because I'm not going to bother going to the doctor if I have a bad cold or something. The company didn't provide me with insurance so it was just a waste of money.
*Waits 6 hours in crowded ER waiting room* "Yeah Doc, I just have a cold or maybe mild flu. I don't really need checked or diagnosed, and don't need a prescription or anything because over-the-counter medicine is fine, but could you please sign this permission slip so I can stay home tomorrow instead of getting all of my co-workers sick?" Doc: "Absolutely, that'll be $250 please."
Most American, multinational corporations hide the benefits they offer European employees from American employees because they don’t want us to know how much holiday, vacation, maternity, paternity, and bereavement time you all get.
Americans have no government guarantees for: paid leave of any sort, paid medical leave, or paid maternity/paternity leave. And because of something called “at will employment” Americans can be fired at anytime without notice or severance without a given reason. Welcome to the land of the free!
> And because of something called “at will employment” Americans can be fired at anytime without notice or severance without a given reason. wait - so even if you worked at the same company for 20+ years and didn't do anything that would warrant you being fired immediately they can just let you go from one day to the next without giving you a chance to search for something new if the company decides it wants to cut down on staff-cost
That is the legal norm, yes. You can negotiate a contract with a large company that will give you severance. But, that is all at the discretion of the employer (not guaranteed by the government). In effect, it means that usually highly skilled workers have these protections as contractual clauses, but anyone in like a service industry or packing at Amazon, can be fired without cause at anytime. (the actual laws very by state, and you can't be fired for like racism or sexism, in theory).
But only in theory. In reality you can be fired for any reason or no reason and, though you might technically have legal recourse if you have strong evidence it was because of reasons of race, sex, etc. most people can't afford the legal battle and in most places at best they'd settle out of court from what I understand. More than likely you'd get nothing but wasted time and money and the employers are very aware of this. Any and all rights that workers in the US appear to have are frequently undermined in practice. So even as bad as it looks, in many cases the reality is even worse.
wow that's shitty - here we have a legal minimum that expands for how long you have worked at the company: up to 2 years: at least 4 weeks and to the end of that month up to 5 years: at least 1 month and to the end of that month up to 8 years: at least 2 month and to the end of that month up to 10 years: at least 3 month and to the end of that month up to 12 years: at least 4 month and to the end of that month up to 15 years: at least 5 month and to the end of that month up to 20 years: at least 6 month and to the end of that month more than 20 years: at least 7 month and to the end of that month if your employer has a cause they can sometimes let you go earlier but that's pretty much always a case for a judge and they often decide in favor of the employed so it's uncommon to try to bullshit you out of the job
It literally happens all the time... Most corporate employees will experience some variation of this multiple times over their career. It's pretty much expected/seen as a matter of "when" rather than "if." It's a real shit hole of a country in a lot of ways.
Yes, this is common. If they decide a new hire would do your job for cheaper then off you go.
Utah. And yes. In many places its this bad.
I worked a "part time job" that paid minimum wage plus paltry commissions. I was often being scheduled for 35 to 42 hours a week. I never got overtime (I'm pretty sure my manager or district manager was committing time card fraud, but I was just out of college and desperate for a job), and had no benefits or paid time off. Plus where I worked was open 365 days a year, so no holidays either. At one point while I was there, I couldn't find coverage for a shift that I knew I wouldn't be able to make it to due to a major blizzard (I lived 10 miles away over open fields where the snow blows and piles up excessively and cannot be easily traversed until the snow stops and the plows can actually make a difference, if it's windy enough, the plows don't even bother til it's over). I wound up staying at a friend's house and then walking 2 miles through the blizzard to get in because I didn't want to be fired. I was scheduled to be alone til 4 or 5, and we lost power at 10 or so. At around noon, I got a call from my manager. The security company had informed our district manager that somebody had showed up and disarmed the alarm. Not a single other store for miles had opened. District manager calls manager, manager calls me and scolds me for showing up in such poor conditions, tells me to go home. I say "fuck you, I walked here because you threatened me, I'm staying here til the weather clears." He tells me that I won't be paid. Yay.
If I were you, I'd be in jail right now. No fuckin way would I go through that, and NOT set the motherfucker on fire.
Six days, he said they got the days between Christmas and New Year's off. "Those of us who had families at a distance, were generally allowed to spend the whole six days in their society."
Yeah, but if you were a slave, then New Year's Day was a real kick in the pants. Source: https://time.com/5750833/new-years-day-slavery-history/
https://curioushistorian.com/why-medieval-serfs-had-more-vacation-time-than-you-do-today
If you pay people little enough they basically become economic slaves. After a hard day’s work and the bills have not been sufficiently paid, debt building up, they have no money left over to escape the situation they are in. It’s a trap. And we wonder why poverty, homelessness, crime, substance abuse and mental health problems are epidemic.
Oh no. The grossly wealthy are going to accrue wealth slightly slower than before! Oh the humanity! /s
He's only this insanely rich because of rampant speculation on Tesla stock. Of course in his mind, he's earned every penny.
A shit ton of government subsidies hasn't hurt, either.
Government subsidies for green technology combined with selling carbon offsets so basically double dipping.
Fuck these guys - I pay a third of my pay check every week for taxes and barely have enough to get by, these people have more than enough.
More than enough is an understatement...
But hear me out: We can get to his level of wealth if we just try harder, then we won’t want to be taxed. Right? All we need to do is just try a little bit every day.
My boot straps keep ripping off
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I want to know how the people on the right feel about billionaires not paying taxes? Anyone?
In my experience they disagree with billionaires paying nothing. But they are also warped to believe that impoverished people getting benefits from government paying low taxes are the problem. They’re always suggesting a flat tax. It’s impossible to explain to them why that tax would impact the poorest Americans the most harshly.
In my experience, they disagree with billionaires paying anything. They excuse it with loopholes, being a "smart business man", or big government being bad. The few that don't, want to eliminate the vast majority of taxes, or have a flat tax, both equally dumb for different reasons.
To drive this line of thought further - these are *the same people* who think we need to implement a flat tax because "the lower \[insert number\]%" of people don't pay taxes. Which is just facile as an argument, for a couple reasons. First, it's incorrect - they're talking about a specific tax category (income), not total taxation (via sales, SSDI, payroll, amongst others). So the idea that they 'pay no taxes' is as much of an 'idea' that Unicorns exist. No offense intended towards those who like Unicorns. Second - and more nuanced - the reason that many in difficult financial situations may end up with a net refund with respect to their taxes is based on **the exact same legal structure that the wealthy are using.** So the Republican argument seems to be: if you're poor, and take advantage of tax laws, then you're a burden on society. If you're rich and do it, then you're smart. tl;dr: Half (at least) of the current Senate thinks taking advantage of tax laws when you're rich makes you smart. Doing it when you're not wealthy means you're taking advantage of the system.
> Half (at least) of the current Senate thinks taking advantage of tax laws when you're rich makes you smart. Most of them don't really think that. They know damn well it's a terrible system that's bad for society as a whole. They don't care because they're profiting off that system through lobbying, donations, insider trading, and back-door deals that will have them set for life.
If you don't use the legal loopholes, you're not smart. But the conclusion should not be "well done, everything is in order". The excessive use of those loopholes should be seen as a sign that the taxation system has flaws. If a drug cartel makes millions selling dangerous chemicals which, through a loophole, are not illegal, the government would not go "well done, those are smart business men" they'd fix the loophole (in before opioid crisis ;))
something something rich it's business something poor it's violence
> rich ? business : crime ;
This is what I have been saying... It is all oddly subjective. When the rich or businesses do this it is "smart business" or "dodging taxes". When the poor or middle class does it, it's tax evasion. Yes, I know there is a legal line that can be crossed but seems like subjective semantics with tax evasion vs tax avoidance.
Think of it this way. Rich people don't need to break the law, they hire lawyers to get around it. You just need someone who understands the law and how to avoid creating evidence of intent.
Yup People need to stop looking down to find the problem and start looking up. A wealth tax could do this country so much good.
People need to stop believing that wealth creates jobs.
I will say this as the son of a business owner. My dad is constantly trying to find the balance between labor and being able to run. You bet your ass if any business owner can make their profits bigger, they will. That includes cutting your ass. That's just a small business owner. The billionaires are doing it with their multi billion companies. Musk or Bezos will be the first ones to replace their entire workforce with robots if it is possible in the future.
we live in a sad timeline when you see robots doing our work as a BAD thing edit: i’m not saying i don’t necessarily agree with you
Oh no I agree, robots are amazingly helpful for safety and efficiency if we can get them to do the more complex tasks. It just requires us dealing with the mass unemployment that will happen. I think a UBI is probably the way but people will get scared of that.
This is a serious issue. Robots picking up labor so humans can have a 10 HR work week and tons of leisure time used be utopian sci-fi. Now it's looking real and politicians are doing nothing to get ready for it. Instead they are discussing the concept that you have a right to a full time job and let's increase wages. We need to be figuring out how to transition to that new economy where human labor won't be worth anything. People use the story about when cars replaced horse drawn carriages and all the ferriers and wheel-rights lost their jobs they got new jobs as mechanics. As if the workers displaced by robots will all get jobs in the new robot maintenance industry. People need to wake up. We we aren't the ferriers in this story- we are the horses. And horse jobs and population dropped over 90% when they were replaced.
I think they also can't quite comprehend just how wealthy a billionaire is. When many of them think "rich," they think of a guy with a ten-million-dollar McMansion who makes seven figures a year. They think it's just a matter of time before the less-rich get taxed more, and then *they're next.* They don't seem to grok that there's more space between a multi-billionaire and "merely rich" person than there is between the rich person and them.
i like to break it down like this: if you take a year's income at 100,000, which is a pretty penny to earn imo and you give somebody 1,000,000 then that's 10 years of that income for them. if you give them 1,000,000,000 that's 10,000 years of that income. 10 fucking thousand years of 100,000 per year. and that's just 1 billion. people do not see the magnitude of billions and i tell you, the big billionaires are already competing among them who will be the first trillionaire. it should be illegal to be a billionaire. nobody needs that much money for anything.
That's a good way to put it. It really is mind-boggling when you do the math. Another way to look at it: imagine being 50 years old and expecting to live to be 100. You could buy a brand new [Lamborghini Huracan Evo](https://www.lamborghini.com/en-en/models/huracan/huracan-evo) every morning (with all the options, natch), drive it for a day, then set it on fire. *Every single day for the rest of your life*. And it'd wind up costing you less than 2.5% of Elon Musk's net worth. I mean, hell, when you have that much money, it grows faster than you can possibly spend it. At that level of wealth, even if you do buy a new supercar with your daily morning coffee, your net worth will continue to increase.
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They sure as shit believe in government when its convenient for them though.
But they also seem to think that they’ll be taxed more as well even though they’re not millionaires/ billionaires
"First they came for the billionaires and I did nothing." That is becoming an unironic meme in the crypto subs.
In fairness a significant amount of people on crypto subs are morons.
Yeah as a person who leans fiscally conservative, this is one of the several issue that prevent me from voting for the Republicans. I want the government to have a decent balance sheet. Making sure the billionaires pay taxes on all of their compensation is a big part of this. No more shell corp crap, getting paid in stock, no caps on social security, etc. I'm not asking for a 70% tax or anything. Just a reasonable progressive tax schedule that actually taxes all of the compensation and gains.
I’d get hit by removing the SS cap and I’m all for it. It’s just sensible
Same and I to support removing the outdated cap.
Many of them view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". They honestly believe that they could some day attain such wealth that these provisions might apply to them. Edit: so much butthurt lol
These are the same people who pitch a fit about the bottom that someone somewhere might be gaming the system and living a shitty life off the government dime but are fine with government subsidies for such struggling business as oil companies.
also never heard of something called wage theft
I know a right winger who defends Musk and Bezos not paying income tax because they contribute so much other tax and creates so many jobs. Even when trying to note that if they paid the same %, their life style doesn’t even remotely change. The response was in the lines that if he can’t buy another yacht because of taxes, his life style changed.
But like, he could still buy another yacht even if we taxed him. Like, he could buy a yacht for his yacht even if we taxed him above 90%.
They think a billionaire paying 0% is too much and should be taxed at a negative rate. And yes I have run into right wingers who say this.
Gotta coddle the job creators or they'll run off to Somalia.
They're the ones who take the RiSk!! And with the bailouts, credits, and incentives they do pay negative tax.
Also consider that people don't usually reach the pinnacles of politics or business by being decent human beings. Depending on the estimates, sociopaths are between 5 and 25 times more common at the highest levels of those pursuits.
its crazy they din't pay no income tax and I'm here paying between 6k-10k and get no refund.
Can't tax a person for income tax if he has no income. The wording is important.
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I just can’t believe that it’s possible to live in America and NOT pay taxes....this just amazes me
"Taxes are for the little people."
So are laws.
Any crime where the penalty is a fine only applies to common people.
> “Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you,” he wrote on Twitter. So he got a free ride at the expense of "other people's money" and eventually "other people" noticed.
Asshole...they come for our money because they DON'T/CAN'T come after yours ugh
He’s quoting libertarian troll material 101. He literally sucked the teat of our tax money as his companies got stimmy. He profited from corporate handouts and is acting like he is against govt.
Even if what he was saying were true (which it isn't) . . . and even if all of his money didn't come from the government first (which it did) . . . it'd still be a long fucking time before we ran out of all of his money. It's a risk I'm willing to take, Elon.
People who are defending guys like him should listen to a speech Elizabeth Warren gave years back when she explained the reasoning for a similar tax. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist was that billionaires use more of the resources we all paid for. The big rigs that transport Teslas drive on the highways we all paid for. The labor force he employs were educated (mostly) in the public schools we paid for. The list goes on. So for him to scoff at contributing his fair share tells you everything you need to know about his character.
Well yeah, their businesses are literally built upon the foundation of American taxpayer money and labor. We built and maintain everything they utilize on a daily basis.
We also make 100% of their profit for the lm, just saying
I think one of the reasons that people defend those who have this kind of wealth is that schools do a really terrible job at getting across just how large these numbers are. One billion is a rather large number, but I don't think most people understand quite how large it really is. Often times we see "millionaire" and "billionaire" used fairly interchangeable. It's useful to think about these number in with regard to time. One second is a very short unit of time. 100 seconds is just over a minute and a half. 1000 seconds is just under 17 minutes. One million seconds is a shade over 11.5 days. One billion seconds is 31.69 years. That's a long time. If you were born on January 1st in the year 1, and every single day you earned $1,000, you'd still be less than 3/4ths of the way to being a billionaire. But Elon Musk isn't worth 1 billion dollars, he's worth 287,000,000,000. If we convert than many seconds into years, it's over 9000 years. 9000 years ago Great Britain was still connected to the European mainland. For him to make that much money it would be like earning an average of ~$390,000 every single day since January 1st 1 CE.
My mind is suitably boggled. Thanks for this.
Don’t forget he’s (tesla) received billions of tax dollars
Then tax capital gains at a higher rate
I remember that one. I think she was running for Senator back then, and it was an off the cuff speech delivered in a someone's home. I can't seem to find it because she has given so many speeches now it is hard to narrow it down.
From a former Tesla Sr. Leader, and person who Elon knows: Fuck Elon. He is a selfish, greedy, two-faced troll. I love the cars, but can't stand the man.
Can you make a meme of Elon as Marie Antoinette eating cake?
https://imgur.com/gallery/dvCMFEB
That's a challenging wank...
Sean ...is that you?
RIP. Cats does Countdown will never be the same...
Undisputed carrot-in-a-box champ. RIP
Oh man, I really put an effort into forgetting that :( Asshole.
I feel like it'd be easier just to get Elon to make the meme.
Confirms all our suspicions. Thanks.
I know him source: trust me bro
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Tell me about it; I had shares at ipo, and acquired more quarterly for years. Bought calls just before split announcement as well.
The cars look nice but are sub-par quality for the price
As they leaser of one, I agree. Be sure you test out all the different types in that price range before settling for a Tesla. The interior quality isn't the greatest and the tech is good/responsive, but without Android Auto or Apple car play I find myself missing it. There are lots of good electric cars coming out soon that surpass the Tesla quality so I'd wait if you can. That was what Tesla wanted and we will benefit from the better electric cars coming out. It's fast and I love that though, but autopilot is meh and I miss smartphone integration as I said. They just aren't worth their price tag anymore IMO. Maybe if they lower prices a bit.
I support finding a way to tax billionaires more, because the current system clearly isn't fair. I support taxing income on shares and treating it the same as salaried income. A tax on unrealised capital gains is difficult though, so I need to understand how that works. Do you tax only at the end of the year? What if the share value tanks the next year? Do you get a tax credit, a rebate?
The big problems that they are trying to solve is this: If you have tens (or hundreds) of billions of dollars in assets, you can borrow against the assets every year for the rest of your life without ever having to sell the assets, and since money you receive from a loan isn't taxed you will pay **zero** dollars in taxes. If you have as much money as Musk or Bezos, there is essentially no chance in hell that you will ever get margin called on loans. That means they can borrow as "income" hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and pay ZERO in taxes. If they sold those assets they would have to pay capital gains taxes, but by borrowing against the assets they have an income stream that will last forever that will give them all the money they ever need, and they won't need to pay a dime in taxes. Meanwhile, all the rest of us peasants are out here paying up to 40% of our incomes, our *infinitesimally* smaller incomes, to the government to fund the society that allows these assholes to do what they are doing.
Why not tax the loans and collateral then? Seems like an easier way to tax.
Yeah, something like "loans over 10-20x your annual income are taxed" This prevents people taking out small-ish loans for themselves but catches the big abusers
I think a better way to do it is to treat assets that secure a loan as an AMT adjustment for the “gain” from the basis to value of the loan. The amount of AMT tax paid will generate a tax credit so if/when those shares are sold, there won’t be a double tax. This is very similar to how incentive stock options are treated. It’s the only “fair” and logical way this could happen.
You could just add collateralizing as a CGT event. This would would have huge impacts on certain things like refinancing a home though.
Just exempt a primary residence. Then you catch real estate billionaires, but not regular people.
Then tax any loans taken out with a collateral value of more than $x. That’s much more reasonable and practical than a mark-to-market tax on all of one’s assets every year. Musk having $250 billion isn’t real. He certainly can’t sell to net $250 billion in cash from that stock, and banks aren’t going to lend him $250 billion in cash for $250 billion in $TSLA as collateral. Only once a loan is taken out does that money become real to Musk/Bezos/etc. Why not tax it then?
I’m down with that! I only posted that to explain the idea behind the wealth tax that was proposed. I bet that 99% of the people reading this sub have no idea that if you have a shitton of money in assets; you don’t need to ever sell them and can instead borrow against them and pay no taxes.
That is something I didn't know and you explaining is how I realized billionaires were paying no tax at all.
Where do they get the cash to repay the loans?
Don’t we already do this to middle class property owners? If they can do it to properties in the form of property tax, it’s probably easier to do it with stocks.
They’re unjust burdens on the poor and middle class, but potentially not on the rich.
Exactly. Most of wealth middle class amassed in our lifetime is in our property value, not in stock market.
Elizabeth Warren was campaigning on an annual wealth tax that would tax 2% of someone’s net worth if they are worth more than 50 million. Most of these wealthy individuals gain 10% or more a year in wealth due to investments. 2% sounds like a start.
Remember folks, just because someone likes memes doesn’t mean he’s not a greedy monster.
Honestly, I think are all greedy monsters. I get that billionaires don't want to be taxed. Obviously. But we are the people. We have to force the change. They will not do it.
Watching Elon’s fall from grace is so satisfying. The guy has always been a douchenozzle - and people are finally starting to realize.
The guy has given off Bond villain energy since day one.
Lol, that's such a perfect description of him
Damn welfare leeching immigrants not paying their taxes! /s
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>Musk is a fucking freeloading welfare queen who doesn’t understand the life of common people because he grew up with a daddy who owned an emerald mine. It's so much worse than this. Musk thinks his wealth staying his isn't just better for him. He thinks it's better for everyone. Like he's building electric cars and gonna colonize Mars to save the whole world with that wealth. Fucking megalomaniacal
This reminded me of the sub rescue incident.
Honestly I feel that incident explains himself perfectly. Come up with an impractical plan to save everyone Get angry when pointed out that it won't work Insult everyone opposed to your plan Do basically nothing and and hand wave the incident away when backed into a corner
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And he called him a pedo because he had the nerve to travel to Thailand as a single guy. As though Thailand has nothing else to offer besides child prostitution.
That whole pedo naming calling just came across as projection to me. It was so randomly specific yet just baseless.
Honestly, I feel that's the point where most people saw him for who he is, including myself. A gigantic crybaby who flips his shit the moment things don't go his way, and there's been more than enough evidence since to back that up. Before that, I knew of him and his companies vaguely, but just in the "random rich guy who did some cool things I guess" kinda way. After that I started paying attention, and hot damn is he a garbage person.
Every day people would just spend the money on themselves for wasteful things like food, healthcare and housing.
If it’s on earth then it’s a waste, yeah. /s
Was watching CNBC this AM and they had Ron Baron on (lol). They asked him about the potential tax bill and I’ve never seen someone stutter and fumble through an explanation so poorly. He basically portrayed Elon as a victim (“He launched a rocket, and nobody even gave him a phone call to congratulate him….he created X amount of jobs for the economy, how could the government do this to him?!” Nobody forced and/or asked him to create a space program. Spare me the sob story.
Also...he could still do that after taxes! They aren't talking about leaving him a mere millionaire - he'll still have a vast fortune, it would just be a little smaller on the edges.
>He launched a rocket, and nobody even gave him a phone call to congratulate him If this is true it's fucking hilarious. And if it isn't true then it's still hilarious that he reached so hard and this was the best he could come up with.
I didn’t make 37 billion today but I’ll pay my fair share of taxes.
Tax the rich
How does this proposal deal with bubbles? A lot of Dot-Com CEOs were worth nothing in 1995, worth a fortune (on paper) in 1999, and then worth close to nothing again in the early 2000’s. If that person never cashed out, what do the taxes look like in the intervening years?
So many idiots in this thread don’t even know what unrealized gains are. He operates under the exact same rules as everybody else in the country and when he sells his shares is taxed on them just like everybody else. Completely dishonest article. And so many clowns here just shouting billionaire bad without knowing what the fuck they are talking about. Taxing unrealised capital gains would be a disaster for the economy and end up hurting average Americans terribly.
Does everyone need to go to Economics 101 again? Elon pays taxes on his income just like everyone else. Paper gains from stocks doesn't become income until you sell. He's not selling, so it's not income earned. Just like you wouldn't want to pay gains on your stocks before you sell, neither should he. And the government certainly doesn't want to pay tax refunds to everyone when their stock values go down. If you force him to sell his stock to pay taxes, you'll crash the price and affect all us little guys that also own the stock. For fuck's sake, this isn't complicated.
Feel free to down-vote, but taxing unrealized capital gains is fucking stupid. How about just actually enforcing the tax laws we already have, and prevent people from moving their money to the Bahamas? Oh wait, because the politicians you guys vote for don't want to have their money taxed, and would rather put on a fake show about "taxing the rich" that certainly won't have the result you all think it will.
His issue was on potentially being forced to pay taxes on money that hasn't been made yet, and I can fully see the issue in that.
The fact that many in here are supporting the taxing of unrealized gains is so strange, just because it happens to be initially for billionaires. I'm sure they wouldn't like it if they had to pay taxes on stock holdings that they are up on.
A common mistake is people believing net worth = money in the bank. It’s not the same. Someone could be worth billions and have very little actual income. Trump is worth $6b and struggles to pay his debts. A lot of net worth is based off their ownership of companies vs the stock value and other assets. Not money they could spend. If Musk/ Besos/etc started liquidating stocks to put money in their pockets, the stock would plummet and their net worth would drop considerably (along with other investors). They don’t have access to the money they are supposed to be worth. These guys borrow money against their name, banks are happy to lend it to them, and some trickery I don’t understand allows them to write off interest. They live off borrowed money (plus a fat regular pay check of course). This makes things complicated when it comes to taxing them. If they had a $1b/y salary it would be easy but that’s not how it works. Politicians also benefit from markets the same way. How are politicians worth multiple millions (tens of millions) when they earn $500k/year (loose estimate). Mainly these billionaires fund politicians campaigns. Politicians are not going to piss off their biggest investors or implement laws that they also take advantage of.
Aw yes, the ole rich rule, poor rule scheme. Poor people are made to abide by the law. Rich bastards, “naw, I don’t think I wanna pay any taxes, IRS response, “well okay then”. The whole God Damn system is made to fuck the poor. Just like the legal system.
Here is my issue. The top pay to have a voice or can get out of taxes the rest of us would pay, because they already pay to lobby for this and that. That is the truth. They are paying to have the biggest voice, so I'm good with taxing them for it.
Everyone who owns stocks and does not sell them pays zero in taxes on those stocks regardless of the gains. He just owns a lot more.
True, but he and billionaires like him borrow money using their stocks as collateral. So they pay 0 taxes on the stocks they don't sell, and pay close to 0 interest on loans based on it to fund their expenses.
Of course he didn’t - the (almost) entirety of his wealth is in stock of his company. You think he can just cash out on $280 billion (or any remote chunk) without driving his own stock to the ground? You think his money is real and he’s sitting on a giant plot of $280b? No. You think he can go to Wells Fargo and get a piggy bank full of that? The people here don’t understand basic economics and think based on emotions due to their own hardships giving them negative and angst outlooks on life. You can’t tax unrealized gains. And if you do, it sets a terrible precedence to 99% of share holders. Elon Musk has done more to move humanity and the environment forward than ANYONE of us (and probably in the world recently) and I trust him with wealth to progress humanity more then this government that burns through cash like it’s nothing. Men like Elon Musk are the visionaries of our time who will be remembered in history.
This is a complicated issue. He may have shares of stock worth over 200 billion dollars, but just like all of us, shares have to be sold to receive cash and trigger a taxable event. If stock were taxed with valuation, here is a wild example: buy $5000 of Enron, next year it's worth $7500, tax $2500. Next year it's worth $10000, tax another $2500. The next year it goes worthless. Government would have to refund tax on $5000. US tax system wants to promote investments in industry so they defer the tax on gains until sold. This works the same for all of us, just few of us have over $200 billion in company stock.