Comment on Is it really possible to tax the rich?

• InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Those loans are often several times more than the yearly income and done more frequently.

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  • 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.

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    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      But then the value goes WAAY up. Let’s assume you live in a very good house, and mortgage it you’re able to get 5 million out of it. Do you think someone like Jeff Bezos could live for 5 years with that?. You can do it fairly straightforward, everytime you take a loan, the full amount of that loan gets added, after a period of 5 years that value disappears, if at any point that value goes above 10 million, you start paying taxes on it. And the higher it goes the more tax you pay on it, just like how income tax has brackets, and just like how up to certain values are exempt.

      For you or me if we were ever loan 10 million over 5 years we wouldn’t have a way to pay it back. For an Uber wealthy they do that fairly quickly, Bezos mention costs 600k a month, so he’ll get into the first bracket from just that in a year and a half.

      People need to realize just how big the gap is, there are plenty of ways to tax extremely rich people without affecting the middle class by just putting the bracket so high up that it’s impossible for a middle class to reach it.

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      • Windex007@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        The problem isn’t that i “don’t understand the gap”. The problem is that this isn’t what I’m asking.

        How do you define for the purposes of this hypothetical law which loans would be taxed as income?

        Telling me how rich Bezos is is completely tangential.

        I’ve been trying to use the Socratic method to prime the pump that

        -The root of the problem isn’t the loans themselves, it’s that they can “realize value” from shares (using them to secure a loan) without selling them.

        But that doesn’t seem to have gotten anywhere because of how excited people are to hear any question to be somehow a doubting of how rich these guys are?

        If that is the case, and you step back, can you consider an alternative strategy besides just some messy spaghetti definition of “income loans” vs other loans?

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