Billionaires Rage About Biden’s New Tax Proposals
Even billionaires who voted for Biden are furious they’re being singled out “because of how much they have.”
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I don't really understand why they're upset, or how it will raise that much revenue. As the article points out, most billionaires don't get their billions from income, they get it from investments. For instance, Jeff Bezos' salary is like $80k, and then he gets other compensation that puts him at like $1.7M. if you put him in a much higher tax bracket, he shouldn't even care - would hardly notice - because he's worth $194B. To put that in perspective, if he earns just 5% a year in growth on that, it's almost $10B. His compensation is like 0.02% of what he's likely to make on investments, if that.
It's also worth mentioning that most billionaires can't really spend much of the billions. If Bezos tried to cash out much of his Amazon stock, the price would plummet and he'd be worth a lot less. What those guys do is take out loans with the stock as collateral and live off of that. Of course, Bezos himself is at a level of wealth where he can cash out a small percentage and it's still enormous. I think last year he cashed out like $2B worth, which is a giant amount of money, but only 1% of his net worth.
Wealth Tax. That is what we desperately need.
Maybe so, but Biden was just talking about the income tax rate.
The problem with a wealth tax is that it seems like it would be hard to do. If I buy a painting for $1M, do I get taxed on that amount regardless of its value even if it's worth ten times that? Do I have to get it appraised? If so, just once or every year because the value can fluctuate? If I buy a rare classic car that's rusted out, and I restore it, how is the value calculated? Now imagine I have a giant art collection and a giant car collection. It just doesn't seem workable.
I'm sure all that stuff is insured. Not difficult to assess wealth. Don't have a wealth tax kick in until over $30 million (whatever number). Seems imminently workable to me.
If you can afford a 1M$ painting, you can certainly afford to have it appraised once in a while.
Biden went over this. A 25% AMT, which doesn't care what your type of revenue is, you're paying at least 25%.