❤️️ Sign Up ©2025 NetHappenings News Email List😄 🙂https://cyberplayground.org
©2025 Follow@CyberPlayGround
©1998-©2025 *Educational CyberPlayGround®
©2025 https://k12playground.com
©2025 https://RichAsHell.com
©1993 – ©2025 https://edu-cyberpg.com
ESTATE PLANNING
One of the wealthiest House Democrats will propose a bill Thursday that would edit the tax code to make it harder for ultrarich Americans to avoid paying taxes.
https://news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/levis-heir-in-congress-pushes-end-to-tax-loophole-for-ultrarich
Rep. Dan Goldman @RepDanGoldman
Elon Musk paid an effective tax rate of 3.3%. Jeff Bezos paid 1%.
How? They take out tax-free loans against their stock.
The trick is that they are very wealthy, so the banks see little risk in lending to them. So they give them low interest rates. Often these rates are lower than market returns. So to make the payment on the loan, they just take out a new loan and make payment with that. This cycle continues indefinitley because they are making more on the investments than they are paying on the loan interest. If the economy takes a nose dive and they are too heavily leveraged, that is they have too many loans, it can cause a negative spiral and they can quickly have to liquidate a lot of assets and pay a lot of taxes. But provided they avoid that unlucky event, they eventually die. When they die, their heirs inheir their wealth at a “stepped up” basis. So the heirs starting point for tracking if they made or lost money with an investment is that investments value when the original owner died, not the value when the original owner bought them. So all that capital gains tax vanishes at that point. The heirs can then sell some portion of the investments to pay off the loans tax free because the stocks haven’t increased in value since they were inherited. And that is how they avoid paying capital gains. Answer from ResilientBiscuit on reddit.com
Today I’m introducing the ROBINHOOD Act to tax these loans and generate at least $276B for universal childcare and other programs to restore access to the American Dream.
It’s time for billionaires to pay their fair share.
Musk could end world hunger and homelessness and pay his fair share of taxes without feeling a thing. But he won’t because he’s an asshole.
A great passage from The Big Short:
“The unwillingness of the U.S. government to allow the bankers to fail was less a solution than a symptom of a still deeply dysfunctional financial system.”
This new regime–free money for capitalists, free markets for everyone else — plus the more or less instant rewriting of financial history vexed all sorts of people, but few were as enthusiastically vexed as Steve Eisman. The world’s most powerful and most highly paid financiers had been entirely discredited; without government intervention every single one of them would have lost his job; and yet those same financiers were using the government to enrich themselves.
“I can understand why Goldman Sachs would want to be included in the
conversation about what to do about Wall Street, ” he said. “What I can’t
understand is why anyone would listen to them.”
In Eisman’s view, the unwillingness of the U.S. government to allow the bankers to fail was less a solution than a symptom of a still deeply dysfunctional financial system. The problem wasn’t that the banks were, in and of themselves, critical to the success of the U.S. economy. The problem, he felt certain, was that some gargantuan, unknown dollar amount of credit default swaps had been bought and sold on every one of them. “There’s no limit to the risk in the market,” he said. “A bank with a market capitalization of one billion dollars might have one trillion dollars’ worth of credit default swaps outstanding. No one knows how many there are! And no one knows where they are!”
The failure of, say, Citigroup might be economically tolerable. It would trigger losses to Citigroup’s shareholders, bondholders, and employees–but the sums involved were known to all. Citigroup’s failure, however, would also trigger the payoff of a massive bet of unknown dimensions: from people who had sold credit default swaps on Citigroup to those who had bought them.
This was yet another consequence of turning Wall Street partnerships into public corporations: It turned them into objects of speculation. It was no longer the social and economic relevance of a bank that rendered it too big to fail, but the number of side bets that had been made upon it.
▓▓▓—▓▓▓—▓▓▓