Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich?
FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 5 weeks agoWhy? Are any loans ever taxed?
There were tax evasion schemes in the UK where wealthy people could take loans from an offshore entity they contributed to and never pay the loans back. But this was shutdown fairly quickly by HMRC (British IRS) and a bunch of people were fined / went to jail. Don’t know if the same is true in America?
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
If a loan is acting as income (like it does for the ultra wealthy) then it should be treated like income and taxed accordingly.
Windex007@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
How do you establish that a loan is or isn’t “acting as income”?
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Those loans are often several times more than the yearly income and done more frequently.
Windex007@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
My mortgage was many times my yearly income.
So then you just have frequency, which is easily gamed by getting fewer larger loans. Maybe one every three to five years? At that point it really is just a mortgage with stock as collateral rather than a house.
Like, you’re not wrong in your intuition that the system is problematic. Mine (and others) point is that the devil is in the details, and they’re not trivial.
FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
And what exactly is the difference between a loan and a loan acting as income?
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Those loans are often several times more than the yearly income and done more frequently.
FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
You don’t have to repay income. When you repay the loan should you get the tax back?