These are the people destroying our world with their greed.
Warren Buffet is hypocritical piece of shit.
No one among the 25 wealthiest avoided as much tax as Buffett, the grandfatherly centibillionaire. That’s perhaps surprising, given his public stance as an advocate of higher taxes for the rich. According to Forbes, his riches rose $24.3 billion between 2014 and 2018. Over those years, the data shows, Buffett reported paying $23.7 million in taxes.
That works out to a true tax rate of 0.1%, or less than 10 cents for every $100 he added to his wealth.
My “true tax rate” is a low single digit number too, if you measure it the same way, and I make ~$50k a year.
It’s extremely disingenuous to talk about taxes paid as a percentage of income, and as a percentage of total wealth/net worth, in the same breath, as if they are anywhere near the same thing.
It’s also extremely disingenuous to say someone is ‘avoiding tax’ by not paying tax on their unrealized gains in net worth. He doesn’t OWE any tax on that. NOBODY in the US does.
This is like calling someone a draft dodger, who was never drafted, lol.
Normal people regularly owe taxes on unrealized gains. That’s what property tax increases are.
- Property taxes are not levied federally, but on the state level
- Buffett pays property tax too
Not sure what point you were trying to make here, lol. There is no type of unrealized gain that “normal people” are taxed on (federally or otherwise), but Buffett isn’t.
I had hoped the point would be pretty obvious. Most people’s homes represent a significant part of their net worth, often a majority of their assets. The unrealized gains on that are taxed.
Billionaires generally (are there even any counterexamples?) do not have the majority of their net worth stored in assets that are taxed the same way. It’s a meaningful difference.
It is kinda weird that real estate gets taxed just for existing and being held, but stocks, which supposedly represent a fraction of a mass of real wealth too, don’t get taxed while just being held.
are there even any counterexamples?
Actually, there are a large number of billionaires whose primary assets are literally property.
I had hoped the point would be pretty obvious. Most people’s homes represent a significant part of their net worth, often a majority of their assets. The unrealized gains on that are taxed.
But the real question is, do you think they should be? 'Cause I’m with you if you say no. Unrealized gains should not be taxed at all, it makes no sense.
You’re misunderstanding how their wealth is distributed. By and large, they’re not directly owning the land and paying taxes. They just own significant stakes in the actual companies holding property. I’m sure they own a house or three, but it’s not significant compared to their other assets.
I’m not taking a position on whether property taxes are good. I think they are. I’m just pointing out the discrepancy.
Nothing steps Warren Bufffet from taking an income instead of relying upon their wealth.
He does take an income ($100k, very modest compared to others even in the same company: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-warren-buffett-only-gets-174730982.html ).
And why shouldn’t he continue to own things that are becoming more valuable over time, exactly?
We can do something about this. But there needs to be tens or hundreds of millions of us on the same page. Doubtful.
We cannot organize at that scale without media, and its difficult to do even with media.
And our billionaires control the media.
We don’t need the media, we have the internet.
Which is why our governments are trying to kill US Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that platforms cannot be held responsible for their content. (Although, if you want advertisers, it needs to be brand safe, and its this that does most of the censorship) – there are still some limits. You have to take down CSAM when someone posts it, and it’s generally a good idea to moderate spam and hate speech. And when dealing with billions of posts or comments per hour, it’s really hard to moderate at that scale.
Social media allows us to see the truth of what’s going on, e.g. what it’s really like on the Gaza Strip and what’s really being done by the IDF. Police shootings and unnecessary SWAT and DEA raids were a problem before the internet got going, but now when someone dies, BLM and ACLU get videos of the incident, and that fuels discontent and unrest, and to our elites, that’s a problem.
This is the very point of the Freedom of the Press in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to let people know when institutions aren’t serving the public, rather are serving something else, usually plutocratic interests.
All the disinformation, the enshittification of big social media platforms, and heck, Musk’s direct purchase of X are about neutering the power of the internet, which is how I ended up on Lemmy.
Exactly! I get all of my news from Facebook. /s
Touché! 😅
It’s due for an update (I’ve gotten some grief about the block chain part and also that I used an LLM for some formatting initially) but…
I believe the solution is to transition to a new system, which they cannot tamper with and can’t control.
https://sturlabragason.github.io/blog/2023/07/04/Decentralized-Autonomous-Communities.html
How can they offset earnings with investment losses when the maximum is like $3000/year from that method?
The maximum is much higher if it’s, say, a business loss.
Business loss should not be able to be used against personal income though. Business income and business taxes and business expenses for executives is a whole other can of worms, but that shouldn’t affect “income” and tax offsets.
The uber rich spending is generally via “business expenses”.
For example: Elon doesn’t own his private jets, SpaceX does. When he takes it down to Hawaii for a 15 minute investor meeting followed by hanging out with them for the weekend at the nicest hotels with all the fixings and flys back, that’s all business expenses that he “derived no personal benefit from”, so SpaceX writes it all off as a business expense, thus reducing their tax burden and he never personally gets taxed for it.
A less egregious example that happens considerably more: a person has a rental property that resides between their normal living area, which they consider the “home office”, and an area of interest they travel too. They go to the area of interest, but make sure to stop by the rental on the way there and back. The milage from the home to the rental is business miles, and thus they can deduct the travel expense from any business incomes.
I am not advocating for any of those, but it doesn’t really matter if these business expenses are legal because the IRS doesn’t have a great way to determine these minor abuses, and certainly doesn’t have the people power to track it down.
Parasites. Job creators, my ass.
Meanwhile, my long disabled cousin just started receiving SSI after 2 years of them dragging their feet. 2 months in, he now has them again, requesting pension forms, paystubs for work, unemployment compensation forms and life insurance policies. All things he already reported he never had due to his disability. It’s like they’ve suddenly believed things changed in that time window. The whole system seems to be broken, which might be intentional.
You don’t need to break a system to make it broken, just never maintain it and it’ll break itself!
See: Insurance companies
I keep posting the same comment. These people are robbing all of us of our prosperity. We could all be living in utopia…
Thieves!
They are deciding our standard of living.
“This Is What Our Ruling Class Has Decided Will Be Normal” -Aaron Bushnell
Can we eat them now? I’m starving
Title is a little bit clickbaity. The reason a lot of them aren’t paying much in taxes is bcz their asset values grew. But if you arent selling it, there’s no tax to pay. The headline makes it seem like they just aren’t paying any taxes at all.
While there’s criticism to go around when it comes to the tax laws around billionaires, this isn’t really the issue.
Cashing dividens or taking personal loans ahould come at a higher cost for people worth billions. Me cashing a $45 dividens check is much different than Buffet cashing a $250m check.
