The Billionaires Tax Wasn’t New | Talking Points Memo

This article first appeared at ProPublica and The New York Times. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1392764

When people complain that the new billionaire tax is unconstitutional

IMO they are out of their fucking minds…

25 Likes

I recently read that 2%of Elon Musk’s wealth could help solve world hunger.

2%.

25 Likes

I much prefer us soaking the rich than having them soak us.

Btw who came up with this term anyway? To soak something is to immerse or surround it with liquid. What does that have to do with raising taxes? Seems like the opposite to me. Anyway.

7 Likes

“Unconstitutional” is code for “I don’t like it”.

Rec this comment or the rich guy gets it!

10 Likes

The GOP shows the logic.

Racism is a highly effective tool to blunt or even eliminate popular concern for inequality and the excesses of the ultrarich.

14 Likes

Sure, I could feed all those hungry people and teach them to grow their food and become much more prosperous. On the other hand I could build a space yacht and establish the first off world bank where gazillions could be sequestered free of all the Earth’s tax laws. Or maybe extend my life by twenty or thirty years living in a low gravity environment. So I gotta ask myself: What would Trump do? Yeah. That’s what I thought.
Sincerely, T.S.
Elton

9 Likes

Hate to be negative here, but bottom line is how would the Supreme Court rule on it. Kinda think unconstitutional is whatever they want to make up.

4 Likes

We’ve been forced to see this issue through the eyes and needs of the obscenely rich. An entire political class is dependent on keeping things as they are so change is not likely. Unless the lens on this issue is changed.

These assholes DON’T NEED all that money but horde it at the expense of the rest of us. They use the best that America has to offer to get where they are but shirk the bill for it with tax schemes. There’s no reason to treat them any differently than they’ve treated us. Tax them just like the rest of us are taxed. Make them pony up for America if they want America. The rest of us do.

Stop looking at this issue through the lens they, the media and their toadys in the GOP placed in front of us.

15 Likes

The people Trump has Cult-captured will never enjoy the excesses he considers his right and, in fact, his due.

But the Herrenvolk **concept has worked for Trump, so far.

Wait until the Cult figures out that being a minion is not the same as being a trillionaire.***

**more attention should be paid to this concept

*** traipsing to a rally is not the same as living on your own space yacht

9 Likes

I confer “Herrenvolk” on Bhutan. They don’t care about GDP. They only concern themselves with “Gross Domestic Happiness”.

6 Likes

This concept is called depreciation. In other words, you get a deduction based on an estimate, not when you sell something. You could call it an unrealized loss.

That is a very poor example. Depreciation is not an estimated “unrealized loss,” it is a deferred recognition of a deductible expense. If the expense were allowed as a current deduction it would create an unrepresentative distortion of profit in the year of purchase.

5 Likes

MSNBC has broadcast a special on the Civil War, making an attempt to address the issues of that war, slavery, racism and their resultant effects on our interrelations as people.

But there are tens of millions who did not watch, or who did watch and whose reactions were…

“Whew! I’m glad I ain’t one of those folks!”

“Well, that’s all well and good, but it don’t have Jack Shit to do with me…”

Or worse…

Are those people above concerned about the ultrarich?

2 Likes

Billionaires have already secured eternal wealth in South Dakota with Dynasty Trusts. As long as state legislatures can be perverted so thoroughly, it really is only a hypothetical discussion about money the state will never see. Moreover, despite the revelations in the Pandora Papers, media sort of yawned and moved on to The Great Resignation (which may not even exist).

9 Likes

And then there’s the wealth tax on unrealized gains that millions of Americans already pay: property taxes, which every owner of a house or apartment is responsible for. Property taxes are a town or city’s estimate of the value of your home or land, almost always in a year you didn’t sell.

Can’t be said enough: Middle-class home owners pay an annual tax on the value of their home, even when they don’t sell their homes. The same should be expected of the wealthy with their rising stock values. Its basic fairness.

17 Likes

There are so few billionaires a 100% audit rate would be easy to manage even with the necessarily larger case staff. Top level revenue returns for enforcement dollars spent sounds like a win to me.

18 Likes

With market volitility, hard to assign true value to stocks except at point of sale. A person could have millions on paper in a company that goes bankrupt, and that ends up being zero.

Now, could reasonably think of things like forcing them to sell a certain percentage of holdings each year and tax that, but it would have to be something real.

5 Likes

And yet, and yet they’re suppose to be the job creators.

6 Likes

Speaking of “Civil War” I watched it again last night, and found my HS principal. I haven’t seen the man in 41 years but I recognized him from a scene.

And that kid from the Boston Latin School (?), was interesting. Actually the students from the south were also interesting to see how their minds changed from the first interview to the last.

7 Likes

(Blam)

2 Likes