TheDraw was a cornerstone of my teenage years. I would log into different BBSs just to see their ANSI welcome screens, then I would try and re-create them to learn the art. It was a unique form of animation and I was hoping you had figured out how to get TheDraw working.
I also later used ANSI to make my own cool command line prompts in DOS and later, Linux.
Recreate them? we would steal the stream, save it, run it through a hex editor, while watching it draw in a separate window. It got to be just a work of wonder what people came up with, and then my friend got an Amiga, and those splash screens... omg...
You have to invent a whole lot more to have a plastic bottle or even a paper drinking cup, at that point, it'd be simpler to just invent pottery, instead.
I'm not sure that's the mechanism at work because I have boiled eggs using plastic cups and also waxed paper cups many times. I don't think any water is boiling through. The cup itself is staying at 100C, which is below its ignition point.
The cup isn't exactly 100C, it's being heated by the flame. But it's only a few hundred microns thick, and the back is in direct contact with the 100C water. One side is exposed to an air/methane flame at around 2000C/3500F, which (while very hot) is a poor thermal conductor, and the other side is in contact with the water. The temperature at the interface is somewhere in the middle.
Also, you do you, but it's probably not a great idea to boil food in plastic cups or "waxed" (often coated in a styrene compound, not real "wax") paper cups...
My daughter is just getting into photography, and I was hoping your guide would share more of how to set the exposure for moon shots (which can be tricky and unintuitive for beginners). You might want to add some examples and what your settings were, as well as how you derived those settings.
It's really just trial and error. Set ISO to ~800, open the lens all the way, and fiddle with shutter speed to dial it in. Shutter speed is dependent on your zoom. If you're using a wide angle lens to catch the whole sky, you'll get ~10 sec of exposure before you start to see trails, it you're zoomed in, it may be as low as a half second. If you've dialed in the shutter speed to not get trails and the moon is too bright, lower the ISO. Just take a few test shots, dial it in, and then take 3-5 shots in succession and stack them in software.
Oh man. This makes me want to throw my phone against the nearest brick wall sometimes. The UI is loading, I reach for the button I want to hit, but it moves and a different button takes its place because the app/page is still loading, or worse, an ad has taken the place of the button.
This also happens where sometimes the hotbar has three buttons, and sometimes four, and the worst apps are when buttons switch ordinal positions depending on if there are three or four buttons in there.
It feels very strange to get so agitated by these small behaviors, but here we are.
> or worse, an ad has taken the place of the button.
this has happened to me and i even clicked on the ad. It actually made me smile a little bit and reminded me of the "clever girl" scene in Jurassic Park.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "support the Pope", but your simple binary division between "Roman Catholic or Protestant" ignores a lot of the historical tensions between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. There's also the whole issue with the Oriental Orthodox Church, which went into schism after the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which was LONG before the Great Schism in 1054. How do they fit into your categorization?
You might find it interesting to study more details about the history of Christianity. It's not so simple as "Love Pope or Reject Pope."
Considering that the article links back to this post, the simplest explanation might be that the author changed the title at some point. If this were a larger publication, I would have probably assumed an A/B test
This was 30 years ago, so I'm sure a lot has changed since then. I was a missionary and the way we got into buildings in Toronto to knock on doors was to just pick the last name with the most letters from the directory, buzz them, and when they answered, we would just say "pizza delivery" and 95% of the time they buzzed the door open.
It'd be nice if missionaries weren't such hypocrites. Claiming to be the pizza guy when you're actually selling magic underwear is bearing false witness.
Technically it depends on the interpretation of "עֵ֥ד" and "בְרֵעֲךָ֖" whether that commandment is admonishing against telling any lie, just lies in court when making a legal accusation against another person, or somewhere in between.
Even if we accepted the premise that one book should be the basis of all morality, this one contains within itself contradictions, satire, sarcasm, and a community context we no longer have: with individual quotes I can make anyone look like a hypocrite.
To my mind the more interesting question is, does a singular community condemn a behavior in out-group members that they tolerate or even praise in in-group members?
Yes. The inevitable rejection is the point. It reinforces the otherness of the outside world, creating more separation from non-believers and stronger connection and devotion to the cult.
Yes. I'm no longer a Mormon, but I baptized around a dozen people on my mission and they were all found from knocking on doors. But this was also thirty years ago, before the internet was a thing for most people.
It does, however, invalidate the original argument, which was that tariffs are being promoted by the rich because it's better for them than the existing income tax.
Since the existing income tax has lower rates for long-term capital gains than earned income, and the rich defer taxes in various ways or use various tax shelters so they're not even paying that, and payroll taxes (~40% of federal revenue) have a flat rate with an income cap, the conclusion then becomes completely the opposite. They don't pay the income tax as it is but they'd have to pay the tariffs like anybody else.
> They don't pay the income tax as it is but they'd have to pay the tariffs like anybody else.
As a percentage of their wealth they will pay a lot less than the middle class or poor do when it comes to any consumption tax or tariff. Because once again, the system is stacked in their favor.
Neither sales nor income taxes are "a percentage of their wealth" in any case. The issue is that in practice their declared income isn't inherently higher than their spending and it's often lower, so the argument that the existing income tax would collect more from them than a consumption tax is erroneous.
> It does, however, invalidate the original argument, which was that tariffs are being promoted by the rich because it's better for them than the existing income tax
If I were to steelman that argument, I'd say getting rid of income tax takes the wind out of the sails of the "wealth tax" / "tax the billionaires" / "fix the loopholes" argument which seem to be gathering steam.
That it kills or underfunds government social-safety programs is a secondary bonus, and using it as an excuse for decapitating safety/oversight/enforcement agencies who get in the way of higher profits via "overregulation" is a tertiary bonus for those that believe in starving the beast that is central government.
> If I were to steelman that argument, I'd say getting rid of income tax takes the wind out of the sails of the "wealth tax" / "tax the billionaires" / "fix the loopholes" argument which seem to be gathering steam.
The trouble there is that those arguments are incoherent.
If you invest in something and then sell the investment at a profit, the profit is a capital gain. You know how much it is because there was just a transaction, you can spend the money, it's currently in cash so you're not being forced to sell an illiquid or indivisible asset in order to pay the tax on it, if you're using an income tax then that's income.
If you invest in something and its value goes up, that's not income yet. You only have the asset, not its value in cash with which to buy anything or pay tax. The value could go back down at any time. There may not have been any recent transaction so there is no objective way to value it. How do you tax something of indeterminate value owned by someone who may not have any liquid assets? So it only becomes income when you sell it at a profit, and then never selling appreciating assets is a primary way the rich increase their net worth without having taxable income.
There hasn't been any sane proposal for how to do it otherwise. You have some startup founder -- and this is actually the primary vehicle for billionaires to exist -- who owns a company that is now maybe worth a billion dollars. Or they could go bankrupt next year, nobody knows. She doesn't have a billion dollars in cash, she just owns the company, which itself doesn't even turn a profit yet. The only place for the money to come from is to sell the company. To get from a million dollar valuation to a billion, a company has to double every year for ten years. If there is a 25% tax on the unrealized gain, the owner loses 12.5% of the company every year compounding which means before ten years they no longer control the company. Therefore every large company ends up being controlled by Wall St. or foreign investors. That seems like a bad outcome.
Ownership of the company is the thing the money then going to tax had been buying the taxpayer. It wasn't more yachts or houses, for that they'd have had to sell the shares and pay the tax as it is. So that's the primary thing the proposal would be changing about the economy: Corporate ownership moves from domestic individual founders to corporate investment firms and foreign nationals.
The real problem -- that there is a company the size of a country -- still exists, but now all of those companies are controlled by mercenary investment funds instead of only some of them.
The actual cash that went to the government didn't come from the owners nominally paying the tax, because they didn't have any cash. It came from the people buying the shares being sold, or holding the ones being devalued by increased selling, i.e. those Wall St. investment funds. But that's not their money. They get control of the companies when their fund owns them, but the money is from retail investors. It's everybody's 401(k) and pension fund. So that's who ends up paying the tax, because forcing the founders to sell increases the supply of shares which lowers the price which reduces the returns from everybody's retirement account.
The people making tax laws mostly understand this, which is why proposals like that haven't gone anywhere and hopefully won't. But wanting that to happen is the argument that moving this rake out of the way is bad because it would make it harder for someone careless to step on it and whack themselves in the face.
If there is a 25% tax on the unrealized gain, the owner loses 12.5% of the company every year compounding which means before ten years they no longer control the company. Therefore every large company ends up being controlled by Wall St. or foreign investors. That seems like a bad outcome.
Yes, if you pick silly numbers any policy can be made to look silly. A wealth tax would never use a 25% rate because that would eliminate most of the wealth in a few years. Wealth taxes are always very low rates, i.e., 0.15% in Belgium, 0.5% to 1.5% in France (note: France did see a temporary outflow of billionaires when they first introduced this tax, but as the tax is on global worth, only complete expatriation would eliminate the liability); Italy has a wealth tax on non-Italian wealth of about 0.75%.
Corporate ownership moves from domestic individual founders to corporate investment firms and foreign nationals.
No, the opposite is true, since wealth taxes would penalize ownership through holding companies (greater wealth), and a wealth tax would also apply to foreign nationals owning U.S. assets. The most likely implementation of a wealth tax would be progressive (like it is in France), which would harm greater accumulations of wealth, i.e., corporate holding companies.
The people making tax laws mostly understand this, which is why proposals like that haven't gone anywhere and hopefully won't.
America already has wealth taxes. In many U.S. states (and especially a number of so-called "business friendly" red states), businesses already pay the equivalent of a wealth tax on top of their property taxes (the name varies from state to state; in some states they are called franchise taxes, in others "business privilege taxes", some call them "fees"). The rates are all far below 1%.
> A wealth tax would never use a 25% rate because that would eliminate most of the wealth in a few years.
But we're talking about a tax on unrealized capital gains.
A wealth tax has entirely different problems. To begin with, there are major asset categories with no objective way to value them, so how do you even calculate it in the absence of a sale, or prevent those assets from being used as a tax shelter?
Then you're creating a large economic distortion because the tax isn't accounting for risk. A low-risk investment might have had an inflation-adjusted return of 0.1%, but now it's -0.4% and an institution that needs to maintain stability and avoid value loss is forced into riskier investments.
A low rate is also self-defeating. If you use 0.5% against typical assets with a 10% annual return, it's equivalent to an income tax rate of only 5%, but you're still incurring all of the administrative complexity and still have non-trivial perverse incentives. But if you raise the rate to the level that "pay their fair share" normally implies, the perverse incentives become exponentially worse.
> No, the opposite is true, since wealth taxes would penalize ownership through holding companies, and a wealth tax would also apply to foreign nationals owning U.S. assets.
So now you're back to applying the tax to everyone's retirement account and not just "billionaires" and have given domestic businesses a competitive disadvantage in attracting foreign investment.
You want foreign investors to give you their money because otherwise they invest in competing companies in other jurisdictions. What you don't want is for them to get a controlling interest in your companies at a discount.
> In many U.S. states (and especially a number of so-called "business friendly" red states), businesses already pay the equivalent of a wealth tax on top of their property taxes.
And those taxes cause existing problems for them, e.g. companies then avoid setting up capital-intensive businesses in those jurisdictions. See also Land Value Tax debate.
But we're talking about a tax on unrealized capital gains.
This isn't new ground that nobody has thought of before. A number of countries already have wealth taxes. Unrealized capital gains are wealth, not income. They would be subject to a wealth tax until realized, and only subject to a capital gains tax when realized. This is why wealth tax rates are so low.
there are major asset categories with no objective way to value them, so how do you even calculate it in the absence of a sale, or prevent those assets from being used as a tax shelter?
Your paragraph assumes something that isn't true. The problem of how to value assets for taxation is older than electronic computers, and decades ago tax authorities set forth rules/guidelines for valuing difficult-to-value assets. In a nutshell: there are a variety of ways to value such assets, and as long as the valuation of an asset is reasonable within the rules of the governing jurisdiction, the tax authority will accept it (or be forced to accept the valuation by a court).
If you use 0.5% against typical assets with a 10% annual return, it's equivalent to an income tax rate of only 5%, but you're still incurring all of the administrative complexity and still have non-trivial perverse incentives. But if you raise the rate to the level that "pay their fare share" normally implies, the perverse incentives become exponentially worse.
This also isn't true. Again...wealth taxes already exist, and they're administratively easier to implement then income taxes. They're also not intended to replace income taxes; they're intended to supplement income taxes by taxing the people who are wealthy enough that they don't need to earn income.
applying the tax to everyone's retirement account and not just "billionaires" and have given domestic businesses a competitive disadvantage in attracting foreign investment.
Yes, if you choose to implement a wealth tax on everything that would be true. It's a good thing that policymakers in the countries where wealth taxes already exist used their brains and decided to have minimum wealth thresholds for their wealth taxes.
> Unrealized capital gains are wealth, not income.
There have been proposals to tax unrealized capital gains as income. Those proposals are what the comment you replied to is arguing against.
> The problem of how to value assets for taxation is older than electronic computers, and decades ago tax authorities set forth rules/guidelines for valuing difficult-to-value assets.
"The places that attempt this have rules" is not actually a solution. The typical solution is to only apply such taxes to asset classes that are relatively easy to value, like real estate.
But that in itself creates a lot of nasty distortions, like exacerbating the housing crisis. Local government gets tax revenue from real estate, so they get more if real estate is expensive, so they're on board with raising the cost of construction to drive up scarcity. The higher taxes reduce investment (i.e. construction) until rents increase to cover the new higher construction costs in addition to the taxes, and now people are homeless and unable to afford housing. Meanwhile capital moves from local real estate construction and other local businesses that would have to pay the higher real estate costs into global capital markets, reducing local jobs.
And it still doesn't answer the question. How do you value a closely held startup that may grow or fail? How do you value bespoke art? How do you value a contract to pay $100,000 from a foreign company at risk of default? If it's subjective then it's a tax shelter. "Have the courts decide" doesn't explain how you expect them to make their decision.
> wealth taxes already exist, and they're administratively easier to implement then income taxes.
That's not saying much, income taxes are some of the most administratively expensive taxes to implement, and your argument is to use them in addition to rather than instead of income taxes, so the costs are cumulative.
> It's a good thing that policymakers in the countries where wealth taxes already exist used their brains and decided to have minimum wealth thresholds for their wealth taxes.
Your claim was that it would be paid by investment funds. Investment funds easily have enough assets to meet any plausible threshold, but they're owned by middle income people, so are you taxing them or not?
How is "progressive wealth tax" supposed to work for corporate entities? If a massive foreign conglomerate owns a minority of the shares of a tiny foreign company which owns shares of a domestic company, is the tiny entity subject to the tax? What if the foreign country doesn't make ownership structures public? What if the conglomerate doesn't own any part the tiny entity or the entity is a human but the conglomerate has a long-term options contract to buy the shares for a fixed price?
"There are rules for what to do" isn't an explanation. If the rules create tax shelters, you have problems. If the rules create perverse incentives in order to prevent tax shelters, you have different problems. There doesn't appear to be a sensible implementation.
I think the fundamental misunderstanding here is that your assumptions are based on not understanding how policy works in the real world. All of your strawmen problems have already been addressed and they're not serious issues.
What you've suggested for getting around the wealth tax amounts to various forms of tax fraud. That's a crime punishable by many years in jail on top of having to pay the tax avoided, plus penalties, plus interest. Most people aren't Wesley Snipes, and they're not going to risk their freedom to pay taxes. If they really don't want to pay taxes, they'll do what a number of French people did when the wealth tax was first introduced: they'll move to a country without a wealth tax.
(Also: courts can issue withholding orders, stop payments, etc., to domestic counterparties under their jurisdiction. This is a tried and true remedy that's been around longer than either of us has been alive.)
Yes, but it very much matters why you're doing it. Someone who doesn't have enough money to functionally retire, even if they're wealthy, is doing it to get closer to a retirement number. "Rich" people as described here, that make a majority of their money on investment ROI, are playing an entirely different ball game with the same mechanics.
A salaried person has to bootstrap a company using income-taxed money, whereas a business person can engage in creative accounting whereby an existing business can invest in a new business practically tax free.
If your average income tax is 35%, you're paying a ~50% premium to acquire the same assets as someone who rolls over money from business to business. This includes real estate and everything else.
And we need to reward this behavior SO MUCH that we'll drop more than half of the taxes?
People will invest as long as the taxes aren't worse than income taxes. We don't need this much "encouragement" because stock market returns are high enough already.
Free trade is one of those aspects of the game stacked in favor of the rich. It allows US companies to bypass all the protections for American workers and have things built cheaply overseas using foreign labor. There’s a reason the American left opposed free trade until five minutes ago: https://reason.com/2016/03/10/bernie-sanders-free-trade-myth...
> There’s a reason the American left opposed free trade until five minutes ago
I don't know on what scale your clock runs on, but Bill Clinton's "Third Way" campaign was 35 years ago. China's admission into the WTO was under the Clinton administration. If 5 minutes is a generation, America isn't 2 hours old yet on your clock.
It was bipartisan because the Democratic party swung rightwards (towards the center) on economic policy under Clinton with the said "Third way[1]", which combined being socially progressive with economic liberalism, i.e. cozying up to employers rather than workers, which was the Democratic party's former schtick until they lost a couple of presidential elections in a row through the 1980s.
It wasn’t quite bipartisan. Only a minority of democrats in the house (108 of 258) voted for nafta for example. Large swaths of the Democratic Party opposed free trade until Obama.
The rich are always behind every change that people don't like or understand.
The argument used to be that low tariffs enabled shifting work to where labor and environmental laws were weaker, reducing demand for American labor. Effectively subsidizing pollution and human suffering.
But then someone came along and agreed. Can't believe something that he agrees with.
The opposition to tariffs doesn't stem from a kneejerk reaction to a certain someone wanting them. It comes from economic consensus.
Implementing targeted tariffs in a way that spurs domestic labor and secures vital industries is common practice.
What's not common practice or beneficial are the broad tariffs we're levying, which come from a place of ignorance. The implementers literally didn't think retaliation would happen, but it is/will. All these are accomplishing is increasing the cost of goods.
> The opposition to tariffs doesn't stem from a kneejerk reaction to a certain someone wanting them. It comes from economic consensus.
Democrats think lots of things that are "economic consensus" do not accurately describe how the world works in practice, or fails to capture important values. "Economic consensus" also is that VAT is the most efficient form of taxation and that capital gains taxes are harmful.
To be clear about the above, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that position. It’s fine to have policy planks that posit that experts are wrong about something.
That certain someone embraced Bernie's views on the three major points he has most been correct about: immigration, free trade, and the self-serving administrative state. And now a large swath of the other side sounds like Reagan republicans on those points.
any country that doesn't incentivize investment will quickly languish. what the usa should do is allow pre-tax income to be invested, so poor people can also take advantage.
I’ve often seen an equivalence made on this forum between levying higher capital gains taxes and discouraging investment. While they are certainly related, rates of capital gains taxes aren’t the primary driver of productive investment.
We have observed close to two decades of rapid asset price inflation that can very reasonably be argued outstripped actual productive activity. Rent seeking isn’t something that should be incentivized either and is ultimately a very corrosive behavior in our economy, politics and society.
Interestingly, some do. The thought of making some money by buying a small amount of some high-growth stocks, with fractional investment being a thing for several years, energizes many small-time users of Robinhood and similar services. It's still a better gamble than buying lottery tickets, which many poor folks do a lot, sadly.
Poor people are people like us (or sometimes are us), some are quite prudent and would love to make an investment that pays, even if it's small.
>any country that doesn't incentivize investment will quickly languish
And yet the US is pretty unique amongst countries in treating capital gains as wholly different from earned income, and taxed significantly less if at all.
Even as someone who benefits from it, I've yet to see a good argument as to why a working stiff should pay more taxes than someone who makes their income from investments. That's inherently regressive.
because investments result in growth, which results in revenue which results in more being taxed in the net.
consider all of these VCs throwing away money on things like uber. would it be better if they just kept it in a savings account (because of no financial benefit of investing)? most investments don't pay off, so you need a push, the push is that long term capital investments are taxed less.
Again, I don't mind VC's being rewarded, I do mind them paying far lower effective tax rates than the average working guy. Income is income. Maybe we have a carve out that says you can make up to the median household income in capital gains and that's taxed at a low rate, but much beyond that should be taxed just the same as if you earned it working.
I'd need to see a convincing breakdown of the numbers indicating that tax incentives make the difference between risky investments being worth it or not worth it. My suspicion is even if capital gains were much higher, there still isn't anything better to do with your money than invest it.
Also pretty sure savings interest is taxed as capital gains.
I don't think it does invalidate the argument. As a cohort, wealthy people spend a much lower percentage of their total wealth than middle or lower class people do. Any spending-based tax (sales tax, tariffs) will be much better for wealthy people than the equivalent income or wealth based tax.
"The rich" are really two separate groups. The majority of "the 1%" isn't billionaires, it's cardiologists etc. making mid six figures rather than nine, and those people do actually spend most of their income. They buy a big house and a new luxury car every two years and a boat and eat at fancy restaurants every night, and make enough to do that but not enough to do that and have much left over.
The people who don't are the billionaires or nearly billionaires, but they also don't pay the existing income tax because they have teams of tax lawyers and deploy international shenanigans. And then an "income tax" which they pay on $20,000 of declared income is not actually taxing them more than a consumption tax at the same nominal rate on all the cars and boats the billionaire buys the same as the cardiologist does.
Not entirely. Non rich people own houses. If your average person buys a house for 200k, it goes up to 400k and then they have to move to an identical house also costing 400k, getting a bill for 200k of income is going to annoy them. Just one example why gains are taxed differently.
Most rich people have very substantial income. It's just that they also have a lot of capital gain. As an example, most CEO have the biggest salary in the company, but also get other capital comp like stocks.
There is ofc the loan loophole, but it doesn't mean that they don't get any other income, on which they are taxed on.
It is just that, if you calculate their total package, compare to an average worker they pay significantly less taxes *proportionally* because a disproportionate amount of their "income" (some of which could hardly be called income but that is another subject) are in some form that are taxed less.
No that is my point exactly. Ask anyone not in the 1% and 2M$ salary would be huge, life changing, and put them in the "rich" category. So rich do have a huge income, it is just that their other gain are just disproportionately huge compare to "traditional" income.
A number of executives used to make a point by assigning $0 as their salary, and only making money by appreciation of their shares. Better yet, you can borrow money with your stock as a collateral, and cut even more off your taxes by repaying with pre-tax gains: [1].
You were getting downvoted but you're right and I was wrong so I upvoted you. I was thinking a large portion of his compensation would have been in options, but it looks like they're all some form of stock units.
Over time, though, the lions share of Sundar's increase in wealth will come from appreciation of his stock, which will be in the form of capital gains. "Average" people don't have this luxury because they simply need to spend much more of their money to live, and thus most of their income (or increase in wealth) comes from a job.
FWIW I think a much fairer system would be to tax capital gains at income tax rates, but index the basis to inflation.
No, it's not. You can take a loan against your stock and don't pay any taxes. Very common strategy. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, etc. all use this strategy to fund their lifestyles without selling stock.
This is only true for founders who had inherent ownership in the company to start with. Your average dev getting comp'd with RSUs is taxed the same as if that was straight income.
Ok. I don't mind those folks getting large rewards. I do mind when they effectively pay far lower taxes than the common man. You take out a loan on assets? It should be treated the same as if you sold and took capital gains. Capital gains should be taxed as normal income above $medianHouseholdIncome.
first, yes, it is taxed as income, because it is income.
so what - the loan has to be paid off, and the stock will inevitably be sold and taxed. there is no scheme to get away from paying taxes forever without dying, and that scheme (that one that involves dying), is the same one that benefits an average person w.r.t estate tax.
> is the same one that benefits an average person w.r.t estate tax.
No, it's not. 2 points:
1. Average people don't pay estate tax, because only a teeny portion of estates make over the exemption amount.
2. I realize point one is a separate issue from what you're referring to, which is the step-up in basis at death. But that tax strategy of taking out loans to cover your lifestyle so you can pass on appreciated assets with a low basis is only possible for people with a huge amount of assets to begin with (i.e. people who already have enough to completely love off their assets without working).
OK, so you should advocate for changes in the estate tax. When that inevitably fails, because no parent wants all of their money to be taken by the government, we can come back to this thread.
> When that inevitably fails, because no parent wants all of their money to be taken by the government
I only think it fails because Democrats have horrible messaging. Republicans branded it a "death tax", when I think it should be called the "aristocracy prevention tax".
Your average person has no idea how the estate tax works (i.e. they think it applies to them). In the late 1800s/early 1900s the UK implemented what is perhaps the largest nonviolent transfer of wealth by instituting large estate taxes on their aristocracy and landed gentry.
> OK, so you should advocate for changes in the estate tax.
Haha, good one. Good luck with that, you’re up against the most powerful and influential people and their lobbyists. Others have already tried. Maybe if the U.S. were a democracy instead of a plutocracy.
They will pay zero taxes, only low interest on the loan (below 2% typically). It's called "Buy, Borrow, Die" strategy. When they die, their heirs inherit the assets, but here’s the magic loophole: The heirs get a "step-up in basis" which means the cost basis of the asset is reset to its current market value. This erases all capital gains taxes that would have been owed if the assets were sold during the billionaire’s lifetime.
Average person can't get 1-2% loan against their stocks (if they even have any).
Conveniently, there's no mention of the 0.1% in there, and the historical data comparing the tax contribution of the top 1% to the total tax base doesn't include any information on income and wealth growth of the 1% over that same time period. Weird!
But given that the organization who published that was founded by a Newsmax board member, I'm sure they're trying to paint a clear and unbiased picture of things.
400 families own the same wealth as 160 million Americans, so they better be paying far more in taxes. In fact, given how much taxes eat into basic living expenses for the bottom 50%, the rich should be paying even more in taxes.
True of the very rich, but not the average rich. Consider how a SWE may be “rich” compared to a barista. That SWE is probably earning $200k/yr and is paying that income via W2.
> Let’s say you make $1 million per year and your net worth is $20 million.
Then you are unambiguously extremely rich.
Yes there are people orders of magnitude richer, but yes you are orders of magnitude richer than the median American. Money is no longer a daily consideration to live a 100% comfortable and healthy (to the extent money can pay for it) life.
I am well aware of how much more obscenely wealthy the ultrawealthy are. That doesn’t make a $20MM net worth or $1MM/yr household middle class.
It makes them effectively have similar societal power as the middle class. They don’t have anywhere near enough money to wield institutional power and at most exert control on the lives of a handful of employees or tenants or whoever. They can’t get their names on institutional buildings.
They could retire immediately and live on that net worth but their standard of living would be greatly impacted by doing so rather than continuing their income-generating activities.
They could face major financial consequences by spending their money frivolously or losing it in a lawsuit. They have a low enough amount of money that they could gamble it away or lose it all in a bad business investment.
I think that makes them much closer to the middle class than the truly wealthy who cannot lose their fortune even if they tried their hardest and have essentially no feasible way to have their standard of living lowered. For example, if Twitter shut down after Elon bought it, there would be no detectable difference to his lifestyle or buying power. There is no amount he could gamble at a casino where he would lose his fortune.
This really is splitting hairs anyway. There’s a good argument that the median income of the US is very rich.
I take rich/wealthy to mean a much higher social class than $1 million in annual income. That type of income would be like a husband and wife who are doctors working as employees with a boss bossing them around and working long hours.
If you’re a W2 employee like that I don’t think you are rich/wealthy.
This is false. Rich people do pay income taxes. I consider anyone in the top 10% of america to be rich. Perhaps when you say rich you only mean billionaires? Which would be a hilariously narrow view. There are tens of thousands of people in the technology industry alone making 750K+ W2 income. that's rich to me.
it's sad that HN is privy to propaganda and misinformation as well. ask anyone on the street if 500K income is rich, and they will say yes.
You can structure your income to be more tax efficient if you aren't a full time employee. Most people in the top 10% of wealth will be structuring their income in such a way to avoid as much tax as possible.
Umm. Tim was taxed there for selling his shares. Not a salary. His Salary I don't think is mentioned in the article you linked. As of 2022 it was $3,000,000, he was getting ~$47 million that year in stock compensation, which I doubt he gets taxed on unless he sells it.
Only when they are sold, or if you receive dividends. If he doesn't sell them he doesn't pay tax on them.
He can then leverage those stocks BTW to receive loans, which he won't pay taxes on as they are a debt. Then he can make use of the stock without selling it, and then use that extra income to invest in other things that will generate him additional income/capital or whatever.
There are even more tricks you can do at that point, where on paper you are technically making a loss and never pay a cent in tax.
"*Only*" That is a lot of money for most people. How the other half live!
> The threshold to enter top 10% is only 180K
Yes. I was doing it when I was earning less than that as a contractor in the UK. I can tell you how it generally works in the UK:
* You set up a LTD company.
* You pay yourself a minimum salary where you pay the bare minimum tax this is approximately £13000 the last time I checked. I think you can pay any other "directors" this as well, you basically make your significant other one.
* Anything related to work becomes an expense e.g. parking tickets, mileage on your vehicle, laptop, computer software etc. So you don't pay this, the company does and thus you get a tax relief.
* You pay yourself dividends from your LTD company. You pay yourself the bare minimum and leave as much as possible in the company. These were taxed at a far lower rate that the equivalent money if you worked perm.
* You pay your pension via the company (this is tax free upto £60,000 IIRC).
In the US how it is exactly done will be of course different as the taxes are structured differently but I know for a fact that people are doing similar in the US.
This has nothing to do with being rich, tons of middle class people in the U.S. apply these strategies. It is a benefit of being in business for yourself, which is offset by higher risk and higher direct costs for things like healthcare and services and equipment (because bigger companies get volume discounts).
A person paid on a W2 can’t do these things no matter how big their salary is.
I know it has nothing to do with being rich. I know middle class people do this in the US. He was asking how people could avoid it, the simplest way is to become a contractor/consultant/freelancer rather than a full time employee so *you can* restructure your tax.
I can tell you that you cannot do this if you derive your living from a W2 income. as a contractor it's obviously different, but your experience is not really indicative of anything.
That is why many people become contractors/consultants/freelance when they are in the higher tax bands. Which was the point I was making, if people are being smart they will try to avoid the tax.
I also later used ANSI to make my own cool command line prompts in DOS and later, Linux.