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Progressives Unveil OLIGARCH Act to Combat 'Existential Threat' of Extreme Wealth (www.commondreams.org)

submitted 1 year ago by ATQ@lemm.ee to c/politics@lemmy.world

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According to a summary of the bill released by the Patriotic Millionaires—an advocacy group that helped craft the measure—the wealth tax would have four brackets:

2% for all wealth between 1,000 and 10,000 times median household wealth;
4% for all wealth between 10,000 and 100,000 times median household wealth;
6% for all wealth between 100,000 and 1,000,000 times median household wealth; and
8% for all wealth over 1,000,000 times median household wealth;

"In the unlikely event median household wealth fell below $50,000 from its current level of about $120,000, the thresholds would be fixed at $50 million, $500 million, $5 billion, and $50 billion respectively.”

The legislation would also require at least a 30% IRS audit rate on households affected by the new wealth tax.

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[-] CoderKat@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago

But income tax on paper is already higher for the $100k tax bracket than what the ultra rich pay. The ultra rich do everything in their power to not have an "income". Hence why there's this effort of taxing wealth instead.

[-] SCB@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago

You should check out cap gains taxes

[-] MetaCubed@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

The cap gains tax that the richest people in the world never end up paying?

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

From 2014-2018 Warren Buffet alone grew his personal wealth by 24.3B, reported 125M in income (0.51% of wealth), and paid 23.7M in taxes (0.1% of wealth). Over 4 years, this man paid taxes on a tenth of a percent of his income. Similar tax numbers under 5% apply for other billionaires.

The ultra rich never pay capital gains tax, loopholes allow them to have their income in portfolios, which isn't taxed. Capital gains is only for realized gains. When your portfolio is worth billions, you don't need to sell it to have spending money, you can take a loan against the value of portfolio.

Capital gains tax only affects those who don't have a bank's worth of money in their portfolio.

[-] SCB@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My post was specifically that we should increase amount paid via cap gains so I'm not sure where you're going here

These are laws we've written, not magic. We can change them

Edit: also wealth taxes, historically, are among the easiest to avoid via accounting, and the hardest to "fix" as laws

[-] MetaCubed@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

My point is that increasing the amount paid via cap gains does absolutely nothing if the mega rich don't need to pay it in the first place.

[-] SCB@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago

If you increase the amount paid, you are inevitably closing loopholes they use to avoid cap gains.

The two best ways to tax money are money in nnd money out because all of that is significantly harder to hide than wealth taxes.

Here's an in-depth look at why:

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/01/wealth-and-taxes-part-iv.html?m=1

And a good, more generalized piece, on cap gains surging:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/26/why-capital-gains-tax-reform-should-be-top-of-rishi-sunak-list-budget

this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023

617 points (97.8% liked)

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