Topic: George Soros and Bezos have paid almost zero taxes - page 4. (Read 1074 times)

The example of Bill Gates was given in one of the previous posts. He never paid a penny in tax, despite owning around $100 billion worth of MSFT shares. The shares were transferred to Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and that means that these shares will never be taxed (because the foundation is classified as a charitable trust). The case of Bill Gates is known to everyone because it was publicized a lot. Other billionaires keep such transactions as secret. Nowadays charity trusts are one of the loopholes used to avoid tax.

These are the loopholes used by the super-rich to avoid taxes:

Source: https://www.topaccountingdegrees.org/taxes/

I completely disagree with your notion!

1. Income tax is charged on "Incomes" earned during the year. When we say Incomes earned it's actually the incomes realized on which you pay taxes. A person needs to have cash to pay his income tax, if a law comes in that a person has to pay tax when he gains wealth and doesn't matter if he realized cash or not. People will always be short of cash  to pay taxes and it would hamper the middle class the most.

2. Wealth tax is charged on holding certain wealth. You cannot say that Income tax should be charged on the Unrealized Profits of people. Also if someone like Jeff Bezos sells all his assets today and realizes his wealth chances are he would be able to realize just 20% of his total wealth because stock prices would crash too much before enough buyers kick in. So how can you expect from him to pay taxes on this sort of wealth??

3. The idea of calculating taxes as a percentage of wealth built and presenting it to make it look like they paid less tax is absurd. Because this way Satoshi Nakamoto would be the biggest tax offender in history.
 
I don't think we can or we should blame them for this. This is the intelligent tax planning that they do with their assets to make sure they don't pay a dime in taxes. But does this means they will never pay tax? The answer is a plain No! Whenever they would sell off the shares of their companies they will have to pay taxes on them. Most of them might propose the idea of rich paying more taxes. but if a rich intelligently saves tax legally, how can you blame the rich for not paying enough taxes??
 

This is a problem that is being faced everywhere . Wherever you go there are always cases like this or similar to it, where the upper class are being favored more than average and the lowest. I don’t live in the US, but this is the same issue that we are facing here in my country, the rich guys are the only ones that are being favored by the government.

The whole taxes are being dumped on the middle class, while the upper class enjoys paying less and making more money. And sometimes, some of them even avoid paying taxes. And it gets worse when it’s a country where corruption is high, you can hardly do anything against them because they can and always buy their way out of it.

It is not difficult to imagine why this is the case, do you remember what happened in Cyprus years ago? There was even a thread here in the forum about the people that had bank accounts there got their money confiscated in what can only be described as institutional stealing, it is likely that the reason the US is attacking tax havens but not doing anything to reduce the loopholes that allow the rich to do the same in the US is that they are thinking on doing the same at some point in the future.

I don't think that capitalism need to be blamed here, because there is no other alternative. Capitalism means that the vast majority of the people may have comfortable living. On the other hand, socialism has failed terribly. You can look around and examine what happened in countries such as North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. The reason why these billionaires escape from paying tax is not because of capitalism, but because of loopholes that were added in to the tax code by politicians who support them. There is no need to blame capitalism for it, because these loopholes are not a part of it.

Capitalism has its good traits as well as its bad traits and social injustice is clearly not one of the good things. America has been building its economic policy for centuries in promoting entrepreneurship, private initiative, and making money, which in the case of large fortunes does not quite align with the interests of the poorest, and we are faced with the dilemma that economic growth seems to be stimulated by lower taxes, but the poor and middle class suffer from this tax cut, when the rich, who are not at all poor, become even richer by paying little or no taxes. And a sense of shame is not the best helper in overcoming these contradictions.

It is kind of sad how far America has let itself fall. Capitalism is the best choice, but it has to work for the benefit of the whole society because huge inequality just breeds resentment and anger. Sadly instead of paying their fair share - the super rich of the world hoard it, hide it and pay people to make laws that will protect it from a wider benefit to the average person. America is one of the biggest banking privacy havens in the world after they have forced other countries like Switzerland to divulge client details for catching tax evaders. Instead of using their huge might for the good of the world they have simply bullied the money from smaller offshore banking havens into their own banks while protecting the abusers behind it all. All these billionaires should be ashamed of the wealth they are sitting on instead of helping the poorest of their country men and women.

Since they know how to manipulate their taxes and take advantage of their previledges in business will make them stay away in huge taxes in legal way. But the justice should be fair for everyone. If they can take advantage by having businesses that helps the government we might be able to do oy too in a right time and plans we'll our businesses.

The burden will obviously fall on the middle class, because as per Biden's plan, anyone with a taxable income of more than $400,000 will witness a tax increase. Imagine this, the top earners is states like California and New York are all ready paying 55% to 60% of their income as tax. If you increase it any further, then these people will have only a small portion of their salary remaining after tax deductions. This is why I suggested lowering the tax rate, but at the same time removing all the tax exemptions.

You know what was the initial idea for these type of people to not pay high federal taxes and then slowly begun to be zero? It is so that these people could provide something amazing for the nation so that they could benefit that way. A ton of workers, a lot of money, selling internationally to bring money to usa, basically when a nation has a company like amazon then they are doing better even without getting taxes from amazon.

But, what happened eventually? Because of how horrible working conditions are, and how much turnover there is, it didn't help anyone, and now slowly it is moving towards automation, which results with worse and worse working conditions because humans can't keep up with inhuman automation numbers. This caused people to either quit, or being paid way way less than poverty levels, so they got benefits from government and that is paid by tax payers. So what should be beneficial even without tax, became a burden on tax payers.

While what you are saying is true in the sense these people generate jobs and wealth and this is why they are given preferential treatment at the same time they should pay some taxes, however we know this is incredibly difficult because it does not matter what kind of legislation is passed they have lawyers and accountants that will find a way to reduce the taxes they have to pay so this is something that cannot be solved and any attempt to do so will only introduce even more problems.

And don't forget where Biden (just like the Republicans) got their enormous campaign contributions. From the super-rich. He will go easy on them and largely burden the richer in the middle class, because why should the Democrats hurt themselves by alienating their best donors.

Unfortunately, this is so and I do not see anything surprising in this, because it was clear even before the Democrats came to power in the United States. Everything is aimed at making the rich even richer at the expense of the middle class and manipulation in the market. But I don’t think that it will be so in the future, probably in the litter of the future this should radically change. But in the meantime, people will again observe financial injustice.

This is right!
The problem here is the lack of education again! People don't know much about assets and when they hear that Jeff Bezos owns 99.0 Billion, they directly think that it's the paper money that he has saved somewhere.
Then comes Biden and states that rich people will pay higher taxes but in reality that doesn't happen and people have illogical expectations. All that politicians do is saying beautiful words that people want to hear.
People are addicted to beautiful lies and eternal hope.
The world belongs to rich, so, just saying that rich peopel will pay more than average people is a very funny lie. Especially if we consider that there are offshores for a reason, there are loopholes in every law and it's done for a reason!
Russians have some great verbs that really have place in our world:
1. Laws/rules are written for stupids!
2. Laws/rules are written to break!
3. Laws/rules are great when everyone protects it except you!

With all due respect to you, I can assume that you are confusing the meaning of the words "income" and "fortune".
His income may be close to 0, but at the same time his state is growing, this is a normal situation. This is a rather subtle question, since for example, a person may own assets in other countries where he pays taxes by developing a business. This means that in the country where he is a resident (in this case, the United States), there are no grounds for paying taxes. But at the same time, having built a couple of factories, for example in Swaziland, his condition will grow, because these assets belong to him, but he will not pay a cent in the United States. This is a very primitive example of "optimization" of taxation, but this is how it works, and for this reason, many people who do not quite understand the essence, there is, in general, a reasonable question - "where are Bezos's taxes, because I pay them !? "

Biden's tax plan will take the wealth away from the upper middle class and distribute it among the poor. The rich are not going to get affected, because they almost never sell their assets and take loans against the assets to cover the monthly expenses. In the end, the rich and the poor are happy about the Biden tax plan, while the middle class get royally screwed. The rise in corporate tax means that almost all the commodities and essentials will become costlier. Also, families with one or two children are at a disadvantage, as the new tax plan favors those who have a dozen or so children.

I read this recently as well. Whereas with Soros and Bezos, it didn't surprise me. It surprised me much more with Buffett, because he has been an advocate for a long time, and has also publicly demanded several times that "his class", the super-rich, should be taxed more. And then, of all people, he is the one of the super-rich who pays the least taxes. This is exactly my sense of humor!
In general, however, it shows that the U.S. has a problem with taxation in general.

Though we think that Biden's tax plan will be a success, the reality is that there are still many holes that need to be closed. I don't know how much tax rates they managed to get from an uperclass like the multi billionaire mentioned above, but it's pretty bad considering they can get away with it easily, and I'm sure there's still a lot that we don't know and don't disclose to the public, imo.

In reality, the rich people are really those who are smart enough for paying fewer taxes, they are good at manipulating their records and adding some stuff to the business to minimize the taxes. They understand that taxes are the lifeblood of a country but if they can find some strategy to lower the taxes they'll do it.

We have regulators to audit their financial reports, if they are not in charge of tax evasion, then I guess they are not doing anything wrong.

By simply based on some data presented, I think that is not fair as we are not accountants and we only saw the tip of the issue.

The fact is rivh people knows how to avoid paying the taxes which is legally right and one who have skills to do that will do it as long as they can do, if you are an investor or businessman you have high chances and lot of ways to report the earnings into the expenses and avoid paying the taxes whereas a salaried person has no way other than reporting their actual income and pay the taxes accordingly.