Related: Robert Reich posted earlier today that Tesla paid ZERO taxes on $5 billion in sales (earnings?), so that’s just fucking great.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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The issue afaik is that Jeff bezos's $200B is in assets like stocks, and the buy borrow die strategy of getting loans using assets as collateral lets rich people spend money without actually cashing in said assets which would trigger capital gains taxes. Idk how to stop this prevalent strategy but between that and the corporate tax system ignoring money that goes back into the company letting corporations invest their profits to ignore taxes that's why so few taxes are collected on those groups. Feel free to correct anything inaccurate.
you pass a law to stop it. there are many active variations of how to tax such things that come with various benefits and drawbacks.
Seems pretty simple to me. Tax the collateral loans as income. And don't allow the interest repaid to be tax deductible.
Be better to ban loans on financial assets. These are loans against stocks/bonds etc that they commonly use. In order to get a loan it has to be against a physical asset. Also set firm limits to how much any physical asset can be leveraged.
You’re kind of suggesting two different things there. Should loans on financial assets be banned, or should the amount able to be leveraged be limited?
Either would have massive unintended consequences. Mortgages on homes as well as secured car loans would have to be either discharged and re-applied or the terms redrawn. They could also be forgiven, but then every financial institution would go bust or the government would have to step in and shell out insane amounts of money. It would at least cause another GFC, if not a global depression, if done quickly.
I’m not discounting the idea necessarily, but it’s always important to consider the unintended consequences of a simple idea.
and both would have a big impact on the economy, that may not generate overall positive results.
Tax wealth the same way it's already taxed with estate and inheritance taxes. If the person doesn't have enough liquidity, they can sell the assets, like regular people already have to do often to pay the estate taxes.
It's called fiduciary duty
Wait what?
Oprah was a web dev back in her hippy days, and now her ex (Pope of her sect) wants her to man up and do her job.
I think an easy solution could be to start seizing anything over something like 100 million total value, with the value updating once every few years (otherwise people dumping their houses and stock would trigger devaluation enabling them to keep more than they should)