What Happens When You Tax Billionaires At 90%

The rich paid a higher % of the total tax burden AFTER the Reagan tax cuts, Simp.

Don't let “occupydemocrats“ tell you what to think. Unless you are incapable of thinking for yourself, which seems to be the case.




 
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Musk paid $15 BILLION in income taxes last year, Dumbass.

Griw a brain.

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JEFF BEZOS Topline facts: ● Wealth growth, 2014-2018: $99 billion ● Total income reported for tax purposes: $4.22 billion (4.26% of his wealth growth) ● Total federal income taxes paid: $973 million ● True tax rate: 0.98% Additional information: ●

Bezos paid zero federal income taxes in both 2007 and 2011. ● From 2006 to 2018, when Bezos’ wealth increased by $127 billion, he reported a total of $6.5 billion in income. He paid $1.4 billion in personal federal taxes, a true tax rate of 1.1%. ●

Though still worth about $18 billion, Bezos in 2011 reported annual investment losses that exceeded his other income, wiping out any tax liability. Because of this on-paper poverty, billionaire Bezos was able to claim the same $4,000 child tax credit intended to make ends meet for working parents. ●

One reason for the big mismatch between Bezos’ reported income and wealth growth is that he makes sure the company he runs, Amazon, does not pay a dividend to shareholders. Such dividends are taxed annually. Instead, Amazon shareholders--prominently including Bezos-- make their money through the increase in the stock’s value, which under current law may never be taxed.





ProPublica obtained a trove of confidential IRS records that provide a glimpse into just how little tech billionaires pay in federal taxes. The nonprofit newsroom estimated what it called tech billionaires' "true tax rate" by comparing the amount paid in federal income tax against year-over-year changes in Forbes wealth calculations.

Here are some of ProPublica's key findings relating to two of the world's wealthiest individuals:

  • Jeff Bezos paid a true tax rate of less than 1% between 2014 and 2018. During this period, his wealth soared $99 billion while he reported just $4.22 billion in income. Bezos ended up paying just $973 million in total taxes. In 2011, Bezos didn't pay any federal income tax — in fact, he reported a loss that year and even claimed a $4,000 tax credit for his children.
  • Elon Musk paid a true tax rate of 3.27% between 2014 and 2018. His wealth grew $13.9 billion in that period and he reported $1.52 billion in income. Musk ended up paying $455 million in total taxes during that period. For several years, including 2015 and 2017, Musk paid less than $70,000 in annual federal income tax.
So how is this happening? ProPublica emphasizes that this is all above board — the U.S. tax system taxes income and capital gains, not increases in wealth. That means the ultrawealthy can pay lower effective tax rates than a single mother earning $45,000 annually.

There is some hypocrisy here. Many of these megabillionaires talk the talk about taxing the rich, while still funding political candidates who take no initiative to close the most significant tax loopholes available to them. The ProPublica report showed, for instance, that Biden's tax proposals would have a negligible impact on the effective tax rate paid by the top 25 billionaires.

 
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JEFF BEZOS Topline facts: ● Wealth growth, 2014-2018: $99 billion ● Total income reported for tax purposes: $4.22 billion (4.26% of his wealth growth) ● Total federal income taxes paid: $973 million ● True tax rate: 0.98% Additional information: ●

Bezos paid zero federal income taxes in both 2007 and 2011. ● From 2006 to 2018, when Bezos’ wealth increased by $127 billion, he reported a total of $6.5 billion in income. He paid $1.4 billion in personal federal taxes, a true tax rate of 1.1%. ●

Though still worth about $18 billion, Bezos in 2011 reported annual investment losses that exceeded his other income, wiping out any tax liability. Because of this on-paper poverty, billionaire Bezos was able to claim the same $4,000 child tax credit intended to make ends meet for working parents. ●

One reason for the big mismatch between Bezos’ reported income and wealth growth is that he makes sure the company he runs, Amazon, does not pay a dividend to shareholders. Such dividends are taxed annually. Instead, Amazon shareholders--prominently including Bezos-- make their money through the increase in the stock’s value, which under current law may never be taxed.



Do you know what year it is, Halfwit?

Hint: It‘s not 2018.
 
Insulting people doesn't help your case. Insults are the refuge of a weak argument.

In the 1950s and until around the early 80s, the highest tax rate was between 90% and 70%. That was the golden age of our economy. The idea that innovation only comes from the capitalist pursuit of profits and not from government-funded R&D and other sources and motives, is wrong.






That economic boom was due to rebuilding after WWII not a tax rate. Government is waste, the private sector can do anything better and cheaper. Nothing the Government has ever done has made anything less expensive.
 
Insulting people doesn't help your case. Insults are the refuge of a weak argument.

In the 1950s and until around the early 80s, the highest tax rate was between 90% and 70%. That was the golden age of our economy. The idea that innovation only comes from the capitalist pursuit of profits and not from government-funded R&D and other sources and motives, is wrong.







In the 1950s and until around the early 80s, the highest tax rate was between 90% and 70%. That was the golden age of our economy.

It was awesome when the rest of the world was recovering from being bombed into rubble.
You don't think our economy did well because taxes were so high, do you?

The idea that innovation only comes from the capitalist pursuit of profits and not from government-funded R&D and other sources and motives, is wrong.

Who has better innovation with less pursuit of profit?
How's Cuba's innovation lately?
 
“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.


Today we read about roving gangs doing smash-and-grab operations against retailers like Nordstroms and Home Depot; in Red states our schools are falling apart, defunded to pay for vouchers to all-white “Christian” academies; gun violence plagues our nation with particularly high homicide rates in rural Red states; and homelessness stalks city-dwellers at every turn.

The last time we saw the consequences of such inequality was during the Republican “Roaring ‘20s” 100 years ago, when Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, the morbidly rich openly bought our politicians, and gangs whose names are still known today roamed the country robbing and killing with impunity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to all that, and we need to repeat his example today.

FDR raised the top income tax bracket from 25 to 90 percent. Wealthy people in America screamed and yelled, claiming it would crash the economy, but instead that top tax rate kicked off the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation’s population in world history.

As Roosevelt noted in 1936:


FDR created America’s first widespread middle class with a combination of high taxes on the rich and strong unions for working class people. He broke the politically corrupt power of organized wealth for two generations.


Abraham Lincoln was the first president to use the word unions to describe labor organizations; it was such a novelty that newspapers of the day put the word in quotation marks. By the 1920s the union movement had seized the nation, but employers and Republican politicians were still using police, the army, and private armed militias to kill union leaders and intimidate people who wanted to join them.

Franklin Roosevelt put an end to that with the Wagner Act in 1935, fully legalizing unions. By the time Reagan took office in 1981 about a third of Americans had a good union job, and as a result fully two-thirds of American workers had union-level wages and benefits (because unions created the local wage and benefit floor for employers).

The people who were obscenely rich throughout the era from the 1930s to the 1980s had mostly inherited their money from their 19th century Gilded Age ancestors (the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Carnegies, etc.), because the combination of the 90 percent income tax bracket and union demands for meaningful wages kept inequality at reasonable levels.

Rich people were still rich, but that top income tax bracket combined with the power of unions kept the average CEO from taking much more than 30 times what their lowest-paid worker made every year. (Today, some CEOs make more than a thousand times what their workers make.)

FDR’s and LBJ’s social safety nets caught Americans before they could fall into the dire poverty that characterized earlier eras when Republicans ran the show. Social Security and unemployment benefits — both rolled out by FDR in the 1930s — lifted the elderly and the jobless out of poverty, and LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid (1960s) kept Americans healthy.

The result of this was that crime went down and lifespans increased. When the grinding inequality of the Roaring ‘20s and the Republican Great Depression went away in the 1940s and 1950s, the crime sprees and hate-promoting demagogues went with it. Working people with decent wages and benefits, after all, have neither the time nor the need to engage in criminal activity.

Corporate executives lived and worked in normal — albeit upscale — neighborhoods (watch an episode of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1960s to see the homes Madison Avenue executives and media bigwigs lived in), and workers made enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.

Nonetheless, the morbidly rich campaigned relentlessly to take us back to the oligarchic 1920s, demanding tax cuts and union-busting. They funded media campaigns, think tanks, publications, judges and politicians.

In 1981 they got their guy into office; Reagan dropped the top tax rate all the way down to 27 percent and destroyed the nation’s air traffic controllers union as his opening salvo in the modern-day Republican War Against Workers.

Reaganism kicked off a 42-year-long explosion of wealth at the very top of our economic hierarchy, making today’s billionaires richer than the pharaohs. They compete with each other to see who can own the largest private jets and mega-yachts, multiple mansions all over the world, private islands, and even their own spaceships.

Disney’s old Scrooge McDuck comics (that I’m now reading to my grandkids) and their unfathomable money bins have come to life.

Simultaneously, the middle class began its collapse from two-thirds of us in 1980 all the way down to today’s 45 percent (and today it takes two incomes to sustain the same middle class lifestyle that could be done with just one when Jimmy Carter was president).

As the middle class collapsed, lifespans in America followed the same trajectory, unlike other countries in the world that rejected Reaganomics.

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Source: Our World In Data
Reagan wasn’t alone in destroying the American Dream, however. He had big-time help from the nation’s highest court.

Five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court initiated the process with their First National Bank decision in 1978, which said that billionaire and corporate money wasn’t money but instead was a form of “free speech” and that corporations weren’t a legal fiction but instead were “persons” with full rights under the Bill of Rights, including the right to use their “free speech” to own politicians.

That decision, authored by the infamous Lewis Powell himself, made possible the purchase of the Republican Party by the morbidly rich in 1979, floating Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of corporate and billionaire (in today’s dollars) cash, much of it from the oil and banking industries.

Reagan then rewarded the GOP’s affluent paymasters with lower taxes, more tax-code loopholes, and a campaign of massive industrial and banking deregulation, giving particular preference via his EPA Administrator — the disgraced Anne Gorsuch (Neil’s mom) — to fossil fuel and other polluting industries.

So, here we are in a situation much like the one that FDR faced when he first came into office in 1933. Homelessness stalks the nation; three morbidly rich individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans; gun crime is at Bonnie and Clyde levels; and workers are terrified of their employers, who force them to sit through anti-union indoctrination sessions or lose their jobs.

To solve this crisis, we must gather and gain the political strength and will to once again raise the top income tax rate up to 90 percent; to overturn the Taft-Hartley Act and restore the right to unionize without interference; and to strip the poison of big money out of our political system.

The morbidly rich will squeal at even the mention of these tried-and-tested solutions, just like they did in the 1930s. They’ll warn that the country will collapse, or that communism will take us over and we’ll become Venezuela or Cuba. They’ll say that the “job creators” will go on strike like in an Ayn Rand novel and take the economy with them to Gault’s Gulch.

And, like FDR, we need to call them on their bullsh*t.

Billionaires are the problem. Not the solution. Prosperity is created when the morbidly rich, and corporations are taxed at much higher levels. Not lower. Just like FDR proved beyond any doubt.

You have to be a total tool, to buy into the oligarch bullshit talking point, that low taxes and deregulation is what creates prosperity. Or you're a toady working for a billionaire selling that crap.
Apparently you aren’t aware that a Democratic potus just recently limited the rights of railroad workers.
 
In the 1950s and until around the early 80s, the highest tax rate was between 90% and 70%. That was the golden age of our economy.

It was awesome when the rest of the world was recovering from being bombed into rubble.
You don't think our economy did well because taxes were so high, do you?

The idea that innovation only comes from the capitalist pursuit of profits and not from government-funded R&D and other sources and motives, is wrong.

Who has better innovation with less pursuit of profit?
How's Cuba's innovation lately?
It was all part of the success of our economy. There was less inequality and the middle class was much better off than it is today. It was larger and only one income could support a family. Taxing the rich doesn't hurt the economy, it actually stimulates investment. Trickle-down economics doesn't work.

As far as Cuba, that is irrelevant to the fact that the US government is responsible for a lot more innovation it gets credit for from right-wing conservatives. You also forgot to mention that Cuba is economically sabotaged by the united states through an economic embargo. It's sanctioned by the most powerful empire in world history.
 
It's not impossible, but it's still extremely difficult, just as he said. Verse 26, doesn't nullify verse 24.

1Ti 6:5-10 Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself. (6) But godliness with contentment is great gain. (7) For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. (8) And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. (9) But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. (10) For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

Luk 6:24-25 But woe unto you that are rich for ye have received your consolation. (25) Woe unto you that are full for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now for ye shall mourn and weep.


Jas 5:1-4 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. (2) Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. (3) Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. (4) Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.

Rev_3:17 Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked:

Jas_2:5 Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him?

Why would anyone in their right mind, want to be part of a group of people in society, who Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than them entering the kingdom of God? That makes no sense.
You are making a fool of yourself. You misrepresented a famous passage of the Holy Bible in the hopes no one would know better. I have no interest in chasing all your other, out-of-context quotes. Run along.

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What he actually pays, even today, is much lower than what you stated. I present sources, all you have are insults.
Hey Stupid, you brought something from five years ago showing Musk paid $455 million in taxes over a few years ending in 2017.

He paid $15 BILLION in taxes last year.

How much did you pay, Simp?
 
You are making a fool of yourself. You misrepresented a famous passage of the Holy Bible in the hopes no one would know better. I have no interest in chasing all your other, out-of-context quotes. Run along.

Hate-S.jpg

You can flippantly dismiss the Word of God, but it's clear, that the rich aren't going to do too well on the day of judgment unless they dedicated most of their money to helping others.
 
Hey Stupid, you brought something from five years ago showing Musk paid $455 million in taxes over a few years ending in 2017.

He paid $15 BILLION in taxes last year.

How much did you pay, Simp?

What's your source? I'm sure you're misinterpreting the data, assuming you even have it. Provide a link to your source.
 

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