Originally published at: Taxing Billionaires Is the Easiest Way Democrats Could Gain Voter Trust - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. Ask voters in the country’s most competitive congressional districts what’s wrong with America, and you’ll hear two answers. First, everything costs too much. Second, the government is corrupt. Ask them which party will actually fix those problems, and you’ll get a shrug. Corruption…
I think a big problem will be realization. Musk, notoriously, and probably most of the rest of them may have a trillion dollars on paper, but how much of it is in cash? So far, anyway, the tax code has been very reluctant to force somebody to sell assets to pay taxes.
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It may not be the most obvious result, but massive government debt from NOT taxing the wealthy is a huge transfer of wealth to those avoiding taxes by buying and politicians via interest paid not just by governments, but consumers on credit cards, mortgages and car loans.
When consumer borrowers compete with the government and corporations, they pay higher “real” interest rates, which is the money lenders receive for letting someone use their money. That’s more and more money they avoided paying in taxes. So they win twice and consumers lose twice in few government services and sending more of their money to billionaires in interest.
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So 'trickle down" economics is working, the people at the bottom are getting a trickle.
Remember folks when you voted for St. Ronnie, our other (moronIc) President, complients of the GOP you voted for this.
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“The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall.” – Denis Healey
(If only the tax cheats went to prison…)
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Or even buy yachts, they just borrow against their unrealized “fortunes.”
Want to buy a yacht? Sell some fucking stock.
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Then force a surcharge % on loans against stock assets for individuals so the tax advantage of borrowing @ 6% to avoid the 40% tax is gone.
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Ask them which party will actually fix those problems, and you’ll get a shrug.
How many of you are willing to do anything but shrug? Any chance the Democrats will be any less corrupt than the Republicans. Same billionaires own both groups and the judiciary.
Politics in general is corrupt. It’s unavoidable.
But democrats offer to do stuff I happen to mostly agree with.
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It is made more corrupt by the utter indifference we have toward it.
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Ya know… if Congress actually did their job as outlined in the Constitution we’d be a lot better off. But the present crew are slaves to trump.
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Congress does exactly what the billionaires who fund them tell them to do. No more and no less. Once upon a time Congress used to be a center of power. Now it is just a place where flunkies work to fool the rubes.
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A primary driver of corruption is money in politics, and while the idea of taxing billionaires is popular (and at least to me, an obvious thing to do), there are many politicians who have taken advantage of money in politics and who may be reluctant to tax their own funders.
Surely, this is a true litmus test - are politicians on the left supportive of the idea, and will they actually follow through on taxing billionaires? It’s difficult to imagine that if money weren’t in politics, politicians would be against taxing them - just like it’d be difficult to conclude that being against doing would be due to anything other than that politician being captured by the money.
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this topic is getting very boring. If we enforced our existing tax laws and eliminated the few most vile loopholes or at least limited them (e.g., borrowing against appreciated assets for decades and then exempting the gains with step up in basis for those inheriting the assets), or just increase the top marginal tax rates to where they had been during Jesus Reagan’s pre 1986 days, we would be in surplus. The other approach which must be implemented is to use a National Wealth Fund that receives a high percentage of ownership in the AI oligopolies who have been stealing our knowledge, work product and data.
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I don’t suppose proposing (even facetiously) a measure to “eat the rich” would be helpful to sell the idea of taxing their wealth?
The IRS needs to funded properly to deal with tax evasion, firstly. We need more tax brackets. It’s not fair for a person with an income of $500k to be treated the same as a person with a $2m income (you get the idea). We need to look at billionaires taking out loans rather than taxable income.
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And overturn Citizens United while we’re at it.
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