this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
1007 points (98.6% liked)

politics

19089 readers
3664 users here now

Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

Rules:

  1. Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.

Example:

  1. Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
  2. Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
  3. No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
  4. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
  5. No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

That's all the rules!

Civic Links

Register To Vote

Citizenship Resource Center

Congressional Awards Program

Federal Government Agencies

Library of Congress Legislative Resources

The White House

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Partnered Communities:

News

World News

Business News

Political Discussion

Ask Politics

Military News

Global Politics

Moderate Politics

Progressive Politics

UK Politics

Canadian Politics

Australian Politics

New Zealand Politics

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 58 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Great article. Nice to see an economist doing such important work. I don't really understand finances. I snipped the parts of the article that helped me understand the finding/headling. There's a great chart in the article of taxation differences since the 1960s too - staggering! Plutocracy in action!

Published in The New York Times with the headline "It's Time to Tax the Billionaires," Zucman's analysis notes that billionaires pay so little in taxes relative to their vast fortunes because they "live off their wealth"—mostly in the form of stock holdings—rather than wages and salaries.

Stock gains aren't currently taxed in the U.S. until the underlying asset is sold, leaving billionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk—a pair frequently competing to be the single richest man on the planet—with very little taxable income.

"But they can still make eye-popping purchases by borrowing against their assets," Zucman noted. "Mr. Musk, for example, used his shares in Tesla as collateral to rustle up around $13 billion in tax-free loans to put toward his acquisition of Twitter."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

We can tax registered securities. Stock holdings. We can take 5% or 50% of all outstanding shares, each and every year, and transfer them to IRS liquidators to be resold in small lots over time.

We can exempt the first $10 million held by a natural person, (which exempts about 99.5% of the populace from the securities tax) and establish a progressive tax schedule that causes the tax rate to exceed average gains when holding more than $100 million worth of securities.